Delivering on Levelling Up

It has been a challenging year, and all of us across the infrastructure sector are keen to find new and innovative ways to help the country build back better from the pandemic.

That is why it was interesting to hear the CBI recently calling on the government to do more to end the North-South divide and to use new climate targets to push forward a new industrial revolution across Britain. Tony Banker, head of the CBI, delivered his warning that plans to level up the UK must be spread across the entirety of the UK rather than being concentrated across the south east of England.

Tony spoke at the business group’s annual conference to warn that public sector plans to level-up the country after the pandemic couldn’t be delivered through a free market mechanism - one that has always favoured London and the South.

Instead, new high-value sectors, including jobs, skills, and investment, were required across the entire country. We see this regularly at CG Utilities, with some parts of the country where our work takes us having a lack of skills and resources compared to other parts.

Boris Johnson, who was also attending to speak at the conference, said that the call to level up the UK was both an economic imperative and his own ‘moral mission’. It is clear that many business HQs are still based in London and the South East, showing that free-market mechanisms have never delivered true and balanced prosperity across Britain. Instead, the rest of the country has become a ‘branch line’ economy in support.

However, new industries such as green energy, fintech and biotech provide us with ample opportunity for the new industrial revolution to take place across Britain as a whole and to ‘redeem’ struggling areas which have seen chronic underinvestment for decades. In fact, cybersecurity, clean energy, life sciences and renewable technologies has no need to be based in the South East - with old and declining industries such as shipbuilding in the Clyde, textiles across Lancashire and Sheffield steel being allowed to decline ever since the eighties.

We must find new and engaging ways to improve this, and organisations like CG Utilities stand ready to help deliver this in reality and on the ground. It is also why it was disappointing to see the scrapping of the HS2 high-speed Leeds leg, which was originally planned as a pivotal means of delivering the levelling-up strategy. The government recently dropped plans to take the HS2 line into Leeds, saying that the Liverpool to Leeds Northern Powerhouse Rail route would be invested in to operate mostly on existing lines rather than building new ones. We must be doubling down on our efforts to deliver prosperity across the country and delivering projects and plans to spread jobs and growth everywhere.

For the UK to grow and prosper in 2022 and beyond, we need to see firms encouraged to cluster in towns and to be encouraged to take a role in local economic strategies on local infrastructure decision making - and the government must come up with a more ambitious, firmer strategy for growth. There are chronic problems still plaguing our economy, including a significant imbalance between cutting edge tech-driven firms of the future and older firms which lacked the necessary investment and skills to compete for the longer term.

The levelling up agenda for the UK feels achievable and can help the country to grow a larger economy than before the pandemic hit. I am excited for what 2022 holds and feel confident that with the involvement of private sector and the government working together, we can reach our shared goals.