The Government has made it very clear that “levelling up”, reducing geographic inequalities in the UK economy, is one of its top priorities. With details as to what the policy means in practice thin on the ground in the Conservative Party manifesto, the budget was eagerly anticipated as the moment when the Government made ”levelling up” real. We are still waiting.
At the Centre For Towns we make no apology for wanting our political parties to focus on the challenges our towns face. We see advocacy for our towns as one of our defining aims. To that end, we have repeatedly emphasised how any political party hoping to win power in a general election must win dozens of marginal constituencies comprised exclusively of voters in towns. The upcoming general election is no different. With the Conservatives piling up large leads in rural communities and Labour performing best in our largest cities, the remaining vote in our towns becomes the decisive battleground.
The government has today announced that an additional 50 towns In England will benefit from the Future High Streets Fund. Fifty English towns were already shortlisted for support, bringing the total number of Future High Streets Fund towns to a hundred. Ever since we were founded in 2017, our high streets have been a priority area for us. This is because they are an issue of deep concern to people in our towns. A declining high street is a visible symbol of a town's relative prosperity and serves as a lightning rod for a raft of underlying problems our towns face. We have been pleased that many other organisations have joined our call for greater priority to be given to our high streets, including our partners at the Institute for Place Management.
This week, as part of our report with Hope Not Hate, we told the story of East Marsh United, a community group formed on an estate in Grimsby. Their story gives us hope. The power of their project is a symbol of what a huge difference people in communities can make, and we stand full square with them, but not just them. Across the country, in town after town, whether it be a church hall in the Cotswolds or the back of a community centre in Hartlepool, small projects punch above their weight every single day. Often staffed by committed volunteers, working on a shoestring but facing down such challenges and doing it anyway. The strength they exhibit, and their perseverance, is a beacon for our country. But there’s a problem.
In tomorrow's Budget, the Chancellor and the government will rightly want to lay out how the economy deals with COVID-19 (Coronavirus). On that specific point, we at the Centre For Towns have produced extensive research showing the geographical distribution of an ageing population (towns getting older, cities getting younger). So, given that we know older people are most at risk from COVID-19, the issue of geography is likely to be important. That said, dealing with COVID-19 is obviously a priority for the Chancellor and the country and we hope the issue is covered well and in detail.
The large majority of foreign direct investment (FDI) went to Core Cities in 2018. This reflects a continuing trend: our Core Cities are best-placed to attract foreign direct investment whilst our towns are starved of the investment they badly need. Today we release a joint report with Ernst and Young which looks at the distribution of foreign direct investment across the UK.
We are delighted to announce a major new research project with Arts Council England. Many of you in towns have expressed to us the importance of arts and culture to your town’s identity and future prosperity. We agree. Which is why we are committed to providing the very best evidence on the status and strength of arts and culture in our towns.
England’s towns are often missed in debates about cultural opportunity. They can be lost in a discussion that has focused upon issues of north versus south, London versus the rest and urban versus rural. Yet, an increasing body of evidence is demonstrating that there are particular features of cultural life in our towns that impact significantly upon the lives of the people who live there. Now is a good time to undertake a review of the level and distribution of investment in, and engagement with, arts and culture in England’s towns.
The project will carry out a rigorous and thorough analysis of the patterns of spending on arts and culture in our towns in order to identify any gaps in existing investment. This in-depth analysis will also move beyond an analysis focused solely on Arts Council England spending to include investment by local government and other bodies such as Local Enterprise Partnerships. We want to present a detailed picture of the scale and geographical distribution of all arts and culture spending in our towns, not just that provided by the Arts Council.
We will also be investigating levels of engagement in arts and culture in our towns, together with an understanding of the physical infrastructure of arts and cultural institutions in our towns. We want to investigate levels of participation in, and engagement with, arts and culture in our towns. Is there, for example, less engagement with arts and culture in particular towns, and is this related to a lack of investment or a deeper problem? This analysis we will of course need to consider the socio-economic, demographic and governance characteristics of our towns in relation to the types and scale of investment they receive.
We want to explore the relationship between the socio-demographics of place and levels of engagement in arts and culture. This analysis will, amogst other things, seek to incorporate place-based measures of socio-economic decline and demographic change in order to draw out how historic processes impact upon levels of engagement in arts and culture. We will want to understand, for example, if those places with the highest levels of socio-economic decline are also places which struggle to capture funding in arts and culture.
Taken together, this analysis will provide a detailed portrait of the relationship between patterns of cultural engagement and the types of investment provided by Arts Council England, local government and other bodies in towns across England.
We will break our analysis down into the Centre For Towns typologies: ex-industrial towns, commuter towns, coastal towns, market towns, university towns and new towns. The remit of the work will cover all towns in England.
We will of course keep you updated on progress throughout and look forward to engaging with you to disseminate our findings.
The EU Referendum result was a political earthquake that should have shaken Westminster and Whitehall out of its unthinking complacency. But instead of addressing the underlying conditions which have fuelled not only Brexit, but the rise of populist movements and the advent of strongman politics across the world, we have reverted to type, content to deepen our divisions rather than bring people together.
The Centre For Towns is committed to funding transparency in accordance with Who Funds You? principles. Here we list our total income for the last reported year as well as all sources of income over £1,000. The Centre For Towns carries out original research on its own behalf, or in collaboration with external partners.
2018/2019 income: £17,000
Donations over £1,000
Ernst and Young: £2,000
Royal Institute of British Architects: £5,000
Arts Council England: £10,000
At ninety three, Wyn Calvin is still a master of the twinkly self-subversion that’s characterised his career as a comedian and pantomime dame. There is no attempt at small talk he doesn’t answer with a joke- unless, that is, he replies in song. He speaks in a slow, lilting, r-rolling Welsh rumble that coats everything he says in the glitter of high drama. He likes to begin lyrical meditations on subjects like the serious responsibility of the pantomime performer- and then puncture them: “Well anyway, aren’t I an old bore?” There is just one moment, in my two conversations with him, when he seems completely serious; and that is when he tells me the story of how he once saved a small theatre in North Wales from the remorseless march of capitalism, in a feat of dazzling Machiavellian cunning.
In last year's Budget the Chancellor placed a large wager on our cities being able to deliver the growth he needs. His commitment to local growth was framed within a package of support for cities and city-regions and had an explicit purpose; to “increase the productivity of the five biggest city regions outside of London so that they matched UK average productivity", in turn leading to an apparent growth in UK GDP of £31 billion a year.
We should be careful not to bet the house purely on our cities. This is especially true in the light of an EU Referendum which saw our towns vote to Leave whilst cities voted to Remain. Economic models which fail to compute the social implications of such an approach should expect to continue to marginalise and anger the excluded. By the excluded, we of course mean the people of our towns. It’s a trend which we see regularly in our work, with our towns routinely described as left-behind or backward; its residents implicitly framed as ignorant or part of the problem.
Quite understandably, people look to us for solutions to the challenges faced by towns. We will have a lot to say on this, but let's start with two basic principles. First, that there are as many solutions to the challenges faced by towns as there are towns themselves. The naive belief that a one-size-fits-all suite of solutions can be imposed upon towns is part of the problem. Second, we are clear that any solutions should begin and end with the greatest resource those towns have; their people.
