http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-29387866

You can actually smell the desperation

Normally I like Tory policies, but this is daft. Tax payers money should not be spent on something that will have a side effect of keeping prices high. Of they're not affordable the process need to come down, not have tax payers loan people more money above what a bank deems safe to lend them.

This really is total crap. There is no, repeat NO national housing shortage. There are plenty of houses in Wales, Scotland, the Midlands and Oop Narth that are having to be discounted because they won't sell.
The answer is neither to build more houses in the South East nor to pour yet more money down the same craphole. The answer is to move jobs from London to the provinces.
And while we're on the subject, London doesn't need any more runways. Enough - the joke's over. When we can land an A380 at Bristol, Leeds and Belfast airports, then and only then should London get so much as a new bus shelter.
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And I thought buying votes was against the law...

And what plan can you provide for this escapade that is cheaper than just building some more houses and a couple of new towns in the South East?
Relocate parliament and a few ministries? The cost would be billions, and the effect would be slight.
Try to persuade the global centres of law, finance, media and so on to relocate to Birmingham and Hull?

You can't force such a change, you can only make the destination city more attractive. The thing that attracts law firms, hedge funds and what have you to London is the fact that it is already crammed with such companies - giving firms access to a deep labour pool, which in turn attracts more of those people. To transfer that effect you would have to pay entire industries - people and companies both, to move.

Except in the event of quadruple engine failure, it's hard to imagine a scenario in which an A380 full of people would want to land in Belfast.

Okay - here are a few things we could do to start with.



* Increase business rates/taxes in London & South East and ring-fence the extra money to be given to the rest of the UK.

* Bring in a levy for any company that has its headquarters within the M25 except where London makes up than 90% of its business.

* Stop 84% of Transport spending going to the South-East.

* Move the Ministries of Defence, Health, Transport, Education and the Home Office/Justice out of London. If they really need a 5-man parliamentary liaison office then so be it. However, the majority of their work does not need to be done in London.



Also, a question. In saying how cheap and easy it would be to build a couple of new towns in the South East, have you factored in the increased infrastructure required and the increased costs of supporting the ageing provincial population as the youth moves to the South East for work?



You see, unless something radical and expensive is done, London and the South East will only become ever more dominant - it's now the most expensive city in which to live. And it's so pointless - big chunks of what is in the South East simply doesn't need to be there.

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A man who enjoys massive inherited wealth doing everything he can to keep as much of it as possible even after he dies. "We're all in this together!"

I think it was Evan Davis putting forward a compelling argument to see Liverpool, Manchester and Leeds not as three separate cities, but as one massive city with three nodes. The transport infrastructure between them is apparently pretty good, and there are enough green places between them to make for good residential areas to service any of the three. The problem is getting the brains of the area to start working together rather than competing. The aim would be to attract businesses away from the SE to other parts of the country. That would require building HS2, as well as upgrading airports and existing transport systems.

Those are ill conceived repressive measures. London is a global centre as well as a UK one, and we have a disproportionate share of UK exports (don't let some spartist tell you that is only in risky finance and houses btw, it is in fashion, film, advertising, law, accountancy, telecoms and many other things).
If you start punishing those outfits for being in London, they will go to Paris, Dubai, Milan, New York and anywhere else, but probably not Hull.
So the levy would have to be small, or exclude exports abroad, and would be easily avoided by changing invoicing addresses or something anyway.

As for a tax just for being in the South East... We already generate far more income, land, and corporation taxes than anyone else.


If that 84% number is a general truth (as opposed to a particular one caused entirely by Crossrail and soon to be negated by HS2), then it should of course be changed.

Migrating ministries is more interesting. Do you wish to do that fairly, so that Derby gets defence, Newcastle gets health, and Belfast hosts the ministry of education? If you do that, it is fair, but it destroys their network advantage.

By having all those departments in close proximity, they support an ecosystem of companies that service their contracts, and employ lots of talented people. You surely hate many of these companies (Serco, G4s, McKinsey, KPMG, all thieves). But day to day they provide a lot of good services and your plan only really works if they set up new or expand existing northern branches. So you still need to keep all your ministries in a cluster. Otherwise all those other jobs stay in London because it remains the centre, so to speak.

This means choosing a city - or a string of them such as Liverpool-Manchester-<whatever else is near Manchester, I don't know, I'm from London, all these places are grim and northern to me, I want to say Bolton, or Preston or something?> To be the UK's second city. The other one with the career escalator effect for young professionals.

Your gripe might be that we only have one such city; but the reality is that we are probably only big enough to host two anyway, and one is always going to be in the shadow of the other. If your hope is that we should abandon big cities and their distorting effects altogether and just be lovely and spread out, I am afraid you have underestimated the network effects that causes cities to be so desirable even though they have expensive land and congested roads.

For what it's worth, I am in favour of reorganizing Manchester and its neighbouring cities into a coherent second city for the UK. I am more than happy to ship a bunch of government functions up there too.


It depends on what you are comparing to what. The advantage of building a couple of new towns in the London region is that they definitely won't be Chinese style white elephants full of empty office blocks. London's expansion presently is only held in check by the green belt and our weird obsession with maintaining very specific skyline views (there is a a tower in London which has a huge wedge shape missing from it so that a view from a particular park bench wouldn't be obstructed).

So all the houses built would be bought, the land taxes would accrue, the economy would grow a little and the investment would be returned.

Promoting a singular second city above all the others as an alternative UK destination with similar network effects would be viable and relieve some of London's land and services pressures. But it might be taken very badly by the third tier cities that would lose out now to two competitors. It is also a complicated solution that could be scuppered by the local politics alluded to by Paulzolo. (If you merge Manchester and Liverpool into one city - what do you call it?). Or the opportunity could be wasted by politicians who do know what the network effect is, but who don't trust voters in Glasgow and Newcastle to understand it.

The costs of aging rural populations can only be borne by buoyant economies. Cities remain an integral part of that. For the foreseeable future, rural areas will continue losing their young to the more vibrant cities, so maintaining the best and most vibrant cities is the only way to deal with that cost.


Is it really a problem if London continues to dominate the UK economy? I live here, in spite of the expensive sandwiches, because those costs are worth paying. If you want to reduce London's preeminence, you have to make somewhere else more like London. It will become expensive, and regionally dominant. And if you don't like financiers and lawyers much, it will quickly fill up with people you don't approve of.

Your colosso-reply sent Tapatalk dappy.



I will endeavour to reply when I can get to a keyboard


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I thought that was the whole point. If the ministries are brought out if London and scattered over a few large cities, then the service companies will also need to come out of London and set up branch offices and recruit local talent or new companies will get a chance to cater to them.

It is the same, in reverse, of what happened when the UK lost most of its car production and big engineering companies. It wasn't those companies alone that moved out or went but, they took hundreds of other small businesses with them, who were sub-contracting or providing specialised parts.

For their sandwiches, and the cleaning of their toilets, I'm those gigs will be wide open no matter how thinly these ministries were spread, barristas are not known for telecommuting, and and waste is rarely mopped up over video conference.

But if these ministries are dispersed between Nottingham, Llaneli, Glasgow, [LIFTED] and all the other towns that would have some kind of claim, London based business services organisations will look at whether to bother opening all those offices or do without them, and just buy more train tickets instead.

If you want to make an actual dent in London's weight upon the UK economy, you have to get high earners to move somewhere else. They won't do that for some provincial one-ministry town, if they still have to commute up and down the length of the country to deal with different ministries anyway. It's as easy to do that from London as anywhere else, and that's where all the best restaurants, cocaine and hookers already live, so why move?

If all the big ministries were in one region, even a ghastly northern one, KPMG would open an office to do accountancy for all of them, McKinsey would open an office for their gigantic brains to get all creative in and so on. Well to be more specific, they probably both have office there already; what they would do is put bigger chairs in some of them for better paid arses to sit in.

Part of what makes ambitious types want to live and work in London is that you can leave Barclays Capital to work for Morgan Stanley without moving house (or even changing what train station you alight from). And that in turn means that companies who wish to compete with those for clients, also want to be in London so they can compete with them for staff. This is called a network effect, and it is what makes some cities become monsters - those that lack it have to build ugly museums and hope that makes some kind of difference. An ugly Ministy of Defence office would be about as useful as that, unless it attracted a network effect.

If those talents stay in London - and without a specific alternative they will - then all the actual value in government business will stay with them. Partly this is because winning good contracts with a government department requires a deep understanding of how government procurement works; which is why a handful of repeat offenders always win new business in spite of their legendary histories of cockup and fraud.

But it's also because, should somebody provincial win a juicy state tender, and successfully manage it without disaster for either side of the deal (almost impossible given the standard of chaos in government procurement) they will immediately be offered a much better job in London, and they would be insane not to take it.

Lol, I can't believe there are still swear filters that can't cope with s c u n t horpe.

I did wonder what you could have written that would trip the filter and still make sense.