Osborne updates ‘Northern Powerhouse’ plans

8 Jan 15
Chancellor George Osborne has set out government plans to boost economic growth in the North West of England to the wider UK rate, which would generate an extra £18bn and put another 100,000 people in work.

By Richard Johnstone | 8 January 2015

Chancellor George Osborne has set out government plans to boost economic growth in the North West of England to the wider UK rate, which would generate an extra £18bn and put another 100,000 people in work.

 Economic growth in the North West of England could match the wider UK rate, generating an extra £18bn and putting another 100,000 people in work, Chancellor George Osborne has said.

In a tour of the region with Prime Minister David Cameron, Osborne updated his plans to create a ‘Northern Powerhouse' so the region can reach its economic potential.

In a speech in Manchester, Osborne said the North West had seen the joint fastest growth in output per head in the UK in 2013, and there were more people in work in the region than at any time on record.

However, he acknowledged that more needed to be done, and set out six aims for the economy.

These included a pledge to support plans developed by areas in the region to ‘give people greater control over their local economy and local government’ following the creation of a directly elected Mayor for Greater Manchester.

If the long-term growth rate of the North West was able to at least match the forecast growth rate of the whole UK, this would add £18bn in real terms to the economy by 2030, Osborne said. In addition, if the employment rate matched the UK average, over 100,000 more people in employment in the region during the next Parliament.

Other aims included making ‘sustained investment’ in transport infrastructure, as well as making the region a global centre of scientific innovation, focused on areas such as material science, biomedicine and supercomputing.

Osborne said that although the North West was growing more quickly than other parts of the country, this had not been the case over much of the last 40 years, and the UK’s economy has become more unbalanced.

‘Our message today is that is not inevitable, it is not something we should accept; it is instead something we have in our power to overcome,’ he said.

‘Rebalancing our national economy, ensuring that the economic future of the north is as bright, if not brighter, than other parts of the UK, is the ambition we should set ourselves. We achieve that not by pulling down our capital city, or diminishing its success. Having one of the greatest global cities on earth, located two hundred miles to our south, should be an asset, not a weakness.

‘We achieve this rebalancing of our economy by pursuing a clear and consistent and sustained plan to hold up the whole of the north of England, including the North West.’

Osborne set out a timetable for action towards these aims for the ten years from 2015.

Milestones include the first election for the post of Mayor of Greater Manchester in 2017 and the planned independent assessment of Greater Manchester’s ‘earn back' investment model in 2020.
It was also announced that Colin Matthews, the new Highways Agency chair, will oversee the development of a plan for a major improvement in trans-Pennine roads, as part of the strategy to improve connectivity. Initial figures released by the government today show that a tunnel could cut journey times across the Pennines by up to 30 minutes

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