The Northern Powerhouse has been near the top of the political agenda for the last two years, featuring prominently in speeches by the Prime Minister David Cameron and the Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne. But just what is the Northern Powerhouse? And why is it so important? The North East Times, a magazine with a four-decade legacy in providing business news for the region, takes a closer look.
The Northern Powerhouse is a term first coined by Chancellor Osborne in his speech in Manchester in June 2014, naming a plan to empower the North of England and re-address the North/South Divide.
In this speech, he said: “The cities of the north are individually strong, but collectively not strong enough. The whole is less than the sum of its parts.”
The government’s solution to this problem has been to encourage the key locations of Manchester, Sheffield, Leeds, Liverpool, Hull, Newcastle, and the Tees Valley to work together and create a pan-Northern powerhouse to attract more inward investment, both nationally and internationally.
Transport is seen as the key driver to creating a Northern Powerhouse — and plans are afoot to improve the connectivity to the region’s cities via rail, road and air.
Chancellor Osbourne also wants the North to cast off its industrial image and become areas of excellence where science and innovation can thrive. Skills is another area identified for improvement, in order to build a talented and sustainable workforce in the North.
Finally, the government has been devolving power to the North (and other regions in UK) so that local authorities can have a greater say on how their areas are run. The government has made devolution a priority, with the Chancellor announcing that 25 City Deals had been signed at the time of his launch speech. Since then, the Prime Minister David Cameron announced in his Spending Review speech in September 2015 that the government had received 38 proposals from authorities from around the UK for City Deals.
This is not the first time a government has tried to rebalance the North/South economic divide, and this latest attempt is not without its critics. But there can be no denying that since it was launched, the Northern Powerhouse agenda has steadily grown in prominence for the public and private sectors in the North.
At present, nobody is able to pass accurate judgement on the government’s ambitious plans for a Northern Powerhouse, as the true results will take decades to reveal themselves.
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