Levelling Up News: 16 October
This is the third newsletter from the Levelling Up Taskforce. If it’s been forwarded on to you, you can subscribe using the link below. If you don’t want to get this, just click the link at the bottom to unsubscribe.
UPCOMING EVENT
Building Connectivity: How best to harness digital infrastructure to level up the country When: Tuesday 27th October at 3pm. Who: Remarks from the Minister, Matt Warman MP, Alan Mak MP, Jo Gideon MP and Nick Jeffery. Click here to register.
NEWS OF THE WEEK
On Monday, the Government announced the latest tranche of emergency funding from the Cultural Recovery Fund. 66% of the £257 million announced went to organisations outside London, well above the 53% share of cultural funding received by the English regions between 2010/11 and 2017/18.
The latest ONS labour market statistics were released. The region with the highest unemployment is the North East, where 6.6% of people are out of work, up 1.4 points since May. Nationally, unemployment is now 4.5%, up 0.4% on May.
The OECD recommended that reducing regional disparities and investing in regional digital infrastructure were essential to the UK’s recovery from the pandemic, in its 2020 UK Economic Snapshot.
Onward research for the Levelling Up Taskforce discussed in Parliament.
On Wednesday, Neil O’Brien MP and Gareth Davies MP cited Onward’s research, which argues that, without action, the economic recovery will be held back by corporate debt that has built up since the start of the pandemic and calls on the Treasury to create a national development bank to invest in businesses and municipal infrastructure to level up regional growth.
VIEW OF THE WEEK
Andrew Bowie MP
My constituency is over 500 miles from Westminster. Driving home would take about ten hours. So when I head home, it’s via Heathrow and a flight to Aberdeen.
I’m not the only one for who internal flights are vital. Local economies the country over depend on a thriving aviation network.
But air travel has been clobbered by the Coronovirus. Covid has reduced air passenger numbers by a staggering 97% this year. Manchester Airport is closing Terminal 2. AGS Airports (owners of Aberdeen, Glasgow and Southampton) have warned of tens of thousands of job losses on the horizon. The collapse of FlyBe early this year hit regional air connectivity hard - 40% of all the UKs domestic flights were operated by Flybe.
Southampton, Exeter, Belfast, Durham Tees Valley, Cardiff, Aberdeen, Doncaster Sheffield, Birmingham, Edinburgh, East Midlands, Manchester, Glasgow, Newcastle, Leeds Bradford, Liverpool (John Lennon) and Bristol all saw vital routes to other hubs disappear
However, we have seen, with the recent reinstatement of the Tees Valley-London Heathrow route (with the support of the Conservative Tees Valley Mayor, Ben Houchen) the demand for domestic air travel remains.
To level up the country, we need these connections. There’s three steps the Government should take.
Create a UK network of Regional Hub Air Routes. Many routes in the Scottish Highlands and Islands would not be commercially viable without Government support, so the Scottish Government impose Public Service Obligations on operators to ensure a certain level of service between these more remote locations and a central location.. These are known as ‘lifeline routes’. The UK Government should create an equivalent network for the UK with equivalent obligations.
Create an Air Discount Scheme to get new routes off the ground. Starting a new route is fundamentally risky for businesses, and it is difficult to guess demand for something that doesn’t exist. Discounting Air Travel to support new routes between regional hubs should be looked at.
Build the 3rd Runway at Heathrow with protection for domestic flights. Building the third runway will protect domestic slots which are at risk from lucrative long haul flights In 2018, the Government announced its support for the third runway and announced that it was willing to intervene to protect 15% of the slots on that runway for domestic flights. It should follow through.
Taking the steps above, Britain can rise above the rest of the world and our regions will truly take off.
MAP OF THE WEEK
Proportion of the population aged 25 and over that have qualifications below Level 3
STATS OF THE WEEK
What happens to young people who graduate during a recession? A new Australian study finds that:
Entering the labour market during a downturn has scarring effects that can reduce earnings for up to ten years after graduation.
A five percentage point rise in the youth unemployment rate reduces earnings by around eight per cent in a new graduate’s first year of work.
Switzerland shows that high intergenerational income mobility can be achieved even without high educational mobility.
13% of Swiss children born into the bottom fifth for household income end up in the top fifth. This is much higher than the US and UK, for whom the figures are 7.5% and 9% respectively.
But academic educational mobility is low. Less than 10% of children with a father earning below the median income get a master’s degree.
What is driving this? In Switzerland more than 70% of students earn a vocational degree after compulsory school. And even after vocational education, around 40% receive some sort of tertiary education.
ABOUT US
The Taskforce is made up of more than 60 (and growing!) Conservative MPs from constituencies right across the country.
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