There’s been a lot of talk recently, especially around the businesses in the Greater Manchester area, about the Northern Powerhouse. But what are these new buzz words all about, and what do they have to do with Manchester? Well, in today’s blog post, we’re going to take a quick look at the new concept of the Northern Powerhouse, to find out what all the fuss is about.
What Is The Northern Powerhouse?
The Northern Powerhouse is a term coined by the former Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osbourne, and represents a scheme to increase the economy of the North of England. The project aims to use urban agglomeration, focussing on the interconnectivity of certain ‘core’ Northern cities, of which Manchester is a key one, to rebalance the UK’s economy away from the South East.
As NWD is proud to have been a Manchester business for over 30 years now, with the people and places of the Greater Manchester area being the basis of everything we do, this is a campaign that we feel passionate about, and that we firmly want to excel. But it’s not just us who think this is a great idea; the Northern Powerhouse has been a hot topic of debate for many of the businesses we speak to daily in and around Manchester, and we’ve met many people who want to know how they can contribute towards making it a success.
Investment Despite Uncertainty
In the wake of the Brexit vote in July 2016, there has unfortunately been a certain level of uncertainty about the future of the Northern Powerhouse concept. Despite these doubts, key strands of the project have continued to hang on as central aspects of government policy, with devolution to the region’s cities and regional transport links being the most crucial.
What’s more, the concept continues to be championed by leading national companies and business groups, such as the British Chambers of Commerce. Additionally, Andrew Skidmore, the Northern Programmes Development Director for Network Rail, recently said that they would also be continuing their investment strategies and transport infrastructure development in the North in line with the Northern Powerhouse notion. One of the most important of these investments is the Ordsall Chord, an £85m project to build a new railway line in Greater Manchester, which will link Manchester’s two main railway stations – Manchester Piccadilly and Manchester Victoria – thus increasing rail capacity in the region and reducing travel times.
Continued Pressure
Although he is now on the back benches in the House of Commons, George Osborne remains the chairman of the new Northern Powerhouse Partnership, an organisation established to spearhead the continuing drive to achieve a true Northern Powerhouse. Speaking to BBC Inside Out Yorkshire & Lincolnshire, he said:
“When I became Chancellor, people were being laid off, unemployment was rising and investment wasn’t coming to the North of England. The big goal here is to try and turn around something that blighted our country for 100 years, which is the North/South divide, and it can’t be done overnight.”
And so George Osbourne is dedicated to continuing the drive to improve the fortunes of the North of England and that can only be a good thing.
A Drive For Urban Agglomeration
In relation to the villages, towns and cities that we live in, urban agglomeration represents the joining up of localised settlements to a centralised location, in order to create one large, continuous urbanised area. It doesn’t mean to say that there shouldn’t be any rural spaces between urban areas, rather that the individual urban areas are all well connected and easily accessible to the economic heartlands. It has many similarities to the concept of conurbation, where towns, cities and regions become so dense, and transport links become so successful, that a single urban labour market becomes established. London is perhaps one of the best examples of this.
Yet, whilst the development of transport links between cities is a fundamental part of the vision for the Northern Powerhouse, it’s essential that this project doesn’t just become about people travelling between cities. At the core of the principle behind the project is a need for genuine investment in the commuter towns around the big cities, so that we don’t end up with dormitory towns dotted around the region, whose only purpose is to service the larger areas.
Hence, the proposal for a number of new towns in the North of England also needs to be taken seriously and, when thinking about increasing the interconnectivity between Manchester and Leeds, for example, we should look favourably on any new towns proposed for the midway points, where both cities easily can be easily accessible by both road and rail.
Change Your Mindset
As a company that sells printers, photocopiers and fax machine in Manchester, you may think it’s strange of us to put such weight on the benefits of the Northern Powerhouse, but one of the core notions of the concept is that businesses work together to ensure the Northern Powerhouse takes hold. We can’t always rely on the efforts of the next government initiative to make this happen, so it’s only in demonstrating our collaborative and economic strength as part of the great might of Manchester business that there will be further top-level developments in the initiative.
And whilst we invest our energies into collaborating in any way possible to help facilitate the Northern Powerhouse, it’s also important that we all – as Manchester business owners – change our mindsets in terms of who our competitors are. As we’re so firmly rooted in Greater Manchester, it’s easy to think about the other Manchester based print management operations as our competition but, if we were based in Greater London, we’d probably perceive the whole of the South East as our competition. Hence, although thinking local might still be an important aspect of our strategy, we must simultaneously start to think bigger, and consider the whole of the North West instead of just our small corner.
Think About People
Another way that we Northern businesses must begin to change is by increasing our sphere of influence and expanding who we look to as customers. It’s inevitable that the public and private sectors must begin to work more closely together, in order to provide a strong, unified voice that can demand more action to invest in the region’s required skills and infrastructure.
In particular, skills is an absolutely fundamental issue that needs to be addressed, and one which we – the region’s business owners – understand only too well. How often have you found an employee who lacks the basic skills required for their job? At the moment only York, Warrington and Leeds sit in the top 20 UK cities in terms of the number of residents educated to degree level and this is something that can – and must – be changed.
Similarly, central to the success of the Northern Powerhouse is the productivity of Northern businesses. Despite the fact that every business owner knows above anything else that productivity is the key to success, Britain continues to lag behind most of the other major industrialised nations in the productivity league. According to the Office for National Statistics, on an output per worker basis, UK productivity was 19% lower than the average for the rest of the G7 nation in 2014. If we all – as business owners – make productivity our main focus, then Northern businesses have the power to make significant gains over our competitors in the rest of the UK, and improving the interconnectivity between the regions and within the North’s key cities will simply help to facilitate this.
Making The Northern Powerhouse A Reality
Despite some fairly significant doubts surrounding the level of support that future governments will put in to making the Northern Powerhouse an actuality, it would seem that the course has been indelibly set and, certainly if the businesses we speak to are anything to go by, the North is already moving in the right direction. What matters now, is that the business community in the North West – and especially in the key cities, like Manchester – continue to make the case for the Northern Powerhouse and consider it when they develop their business strategies. And above all, we must all work together, to make this dream a reality for the benefit of all of us.
Get In Touch
Obviously, as a proud Greater Manchester business, NWD have a keen interest in the Northern Powerhouse and we fervently hope that it continues to develop as an idea and bring a multitude of benefits to the region’s many businesses. If you’d like to find out more about the Northern Powerhouse or find out how you can get involved, then please get in touch with North West Digital today.
You can contact us by email at info@, by phone on 0161 477 8950 or by completing the contact form on the website and we’ll get back to you ASAP.