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HS2 - good for the provinces?

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tbtc

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is it really good for people to be daily-commuting 150+ miles, anyway? I'd say it's not

I think most people assess their commute in terms of time and price - distance is less of an issue.

If people are prepared to travel for an hour each way as part of their commute then it doesn't matter so much to them whether that's 150 miles on HS2 or thirty miles on a Sprinter - it takes just as long.

Return fares might be cheaper on HS2, but why would season tickets be cheaper than the above, already competitive, prices?

Thousands of extra seats - eighteen additional paths an hour, four hundred metre long trains - much cheaper to operate than legacy lines.

At the moment, the "door to door" commute from suburban Manchester/ Leeds/ Sheffield to a well paid office in London is going to be around five hours a day (i.e. you are coming home just to grab something out of the fridge and go to bed). HS2 brings that closer to three hours a day which becomes more feasible for people to do.

The focus needs to be on building more affordable housing in London, not offering cheap season tickets on HS2 to provide another commuter route.

Ideally, sure, but any attempt to build affordable housing in London tends to see the "social" aspect ditched (as unaffordable), the properties snapped up by investors (rather than those needing to buy somewhere to live) and are still going to be horrifically expensive for any basic rate tax payers. It keeps being attempted but never seems to deliver.

the focus needs to be on building a much more distributed economy like that of Germany. It is not sensible to have someone commuting from Darlington to London

HS2 may encourage fewer people to leave the regions completely to live in London (instead commuting), but that doesn't really address economic distribution.

Look at Germany - the financial centre is in Frankfurt, the government is in Berlin, the industrial base is in the Ruhr. Different areas are leaders in different sectors. Real redistribution won't happen until supporting institutions are moved to the regions. If you move the stock market to Manchester (for example), financial firms will follow. If you move the courts to Leeds, legal firms will follow. If you move government to Birmingham, the thousands of government-related jobs (not just government jobs themselves) will also move.

With a structure like that in place, HS2 gives a significant economic boost, as it makes it easier to travel between all these institutions. Now of course it's very easy already, because they're all in London, but in my opinion (and I don't have any data to back this up) it's worth taking a small economic hit to spread the wealth around a bit. And of course there's nothing stopping legal firms with headquarters in Leeds opening financial law offices in Manchester.

The BBC to Manchester was a very good start. Now how about farming out more Government administrative work and headquarters to other parts of the country

I'm all for living in a fairer society like Germany has - they have a much more sensible approach. But, given that we are where we are, I don't know how you realistically achieve that.

There was huge upheaval just to move part of the news/ sports/ kids BBC services to Salford... I can't see us moving the Stock Exchange or the High Court any time soon. Huge numbers of Civil Service jobs are already in "the provinces". Look at the NHS in Leeds, for example.

HS2 only serves London Euston. It will take 20 years and 40bn to save 10 minutes off a banker's commute. In the shires, the forgotten north, Wales , and Anglia, HS2 helps Nobody.

It’s up to you.

Either keep up with the chip-on-the-shoulder stuff about “bankers saving ten minutes” or maybe explain why faster journeys are A Bad Thing?

e.g. if Manchester/ Sheffield/ Leeds will suffer from HS2 and have the life sucked out of them then why are Liverpool/ Bradford/ Nottingham/ Derby so envious? Wouldn’t those cities be jubilant about being kept off the map, if HS2 is going to be such a danger to the provincial conurbations that it directly serves? Shouldn’t the Mayor of Liverpool be campaigning to keep HS2 out of Liverpool (rather than encouraging it to serve his city)?

e.g. why are speed/capacity increases on normal lines “good” but speed/ capacity increases on lines to London “bad”? We have threads where people complain about the fact that a journey in 2017 takes longer than the same route did a hundred years ago (albeit they are generally comparing apples and oranges as the fastest train of the day on a quiet network is being compared to a clockface service on a busy network).

I’d welcome faster journeys between Liverpool/ Manchester/ Sheffield/ Leeds and longer services but a lot of people think that faster journeys are bad if it involves London.

Is this because some people are only happy with better services as long as these improvements happen on existing alignments, and get sniffy at the idea of new lines that don’t follow Victorian routes (HS2, HS3)?

And nobody has explained why a new line from a fairly small place (Tavistock. Portishead, Ebbw Vale, Galashiels etc) into a significantly bigger place (Plymouth, Bristol, Cardiff, Edinburgh etc) will benefit the small place BUT the large cities of Manchester/ Leeds/ Sheffield are at risk if they have a better train service to London? How come Portishead is resilient enough to cope but Manchester isn’t?

(Note that lines to Tavistock. Portishead, Ebbw Vale, Galashiels etc didn't help "Anglia" etc but there's no requirement that every new scheme has to benefit every single postcode in the UK - that's a silly argument)
 
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racklam

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I'm all for living in a fairer society like Germany has - they have a much more sensible approach. But, given that we are where we are, I don't know how you realistically achieve that.

There was huge upheaval just to move part of the news/ sports/ kids BBC services to Salford... I can't see us moving the Stock Exchange or the High Court any time soon. Huge numbers of Civil Service jobs are already in "the provinces". Look at the NHS in Leeds, for example.

Unfortunately I agree. I think it's something that should be seriously looked into (especially with regards to government, with the Houses of Parliament falling down), but I have absolutely no confidence of anything substantial being done.
 

HSTEd

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HS2 will benefit people because it improves their mobility, and that is (almost) always a good thing.

If some towns or cities suffer economic decline because they are outcompeted by London or another major city, so be it.
Towns and cities should exist to serve people, not vice versa.

HS2 can deliver more passenger seats at a lower cost than a conventional line, the higher speed is mainly just a nice bonus. It has lower infrastructure costs due to its high performance trains and simple timetable, lower staffing costs per passegner due to huge train capacities and short journey times and it has lower energy costs per passenger-km due to continuous-high-speed nature of the run and the lighter nature of trains that don't have huge tilt mechanisms in them.
 

yorksrob

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Hold on hold on hold on hold on there skippy.

You are surely not stating that I would have the choice to then live outside of a massively congested city up to another or smaller town close by and near to miles upon miles of wondrous countryside and still do a decent commute into London should my work still be there? My flabber is gasted. Who would've thought of such a thing would be possible.

I suppose that means that unless something's done about the housing market (which our market obsessed overlords are unlikely to do), we can look forward to London's basket case housing economy, in which average housing prices are a ridiculous number of times higher than average salaries, spreading up here as well.

Yippee.
 

B&I

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So I think we can summarise as follows: HS2, regardless of what benefits it may or may not bring to the railway network, will do absolutely nothing to achieve regional re-balancing, so long as the British economy and administrative system remains concentrated in London to its current ludicrous degree. Instead, it will facilitate London's cont8nued growth at the expense of the rest of the country by turning it into a gigantic dormitory subyrb and giving business further reasons to.shut down provincal operations and move them to London.

Mind you, some on here seem to think that all of that is a good thing.
 

fowler9

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HS2 will benefit people because it improves their mobility, and that is (almost) always a good thing.

If some towns or cities suffer economic decline because they are outcompeted by London or another major city, so be it.
Towns and cities should exist to serve people, not vice versa.

HS2 can deliver more passenger seats at a lower cost than a conventional line, the higher speed is mainly just a nice bonus. It has lower infrastructure costs due to its high performance trains and simple timetable, lower staffing costs per passegner due to huge train capacities and short journey times and it has lower energy costs per passenger-km due to continuous-high-speed nature of the run and the lighter nature of trains that don't have huge tilt mechanisms in them.
London isn't really outcompeting other cities if the government keep investing in such a way that it becomes the only game in town so to say.
 

HSTEd

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And there lies the reason for the ‘chip on the shoulder’. So be it? That’s people’s lives you’re being blasé about.
If I'm being blasé about it being ok if towns turn into dormitories, then you are also being blasé about forcing people to remain in small scale job markets where it is easy for a handful of medium-large employers to artificial depress wages for their own benefit.
If the only major employer in town only pays minimum wage and is cavalier about terms and conditions, you have to work there unless you can commute to someplace else.
Because your house won't simply move to a new town.
It traps people and allows unscrupulous businessmen to exploit them.
That is a horrendous attitude!
Why? People move to cities because of (overall!) improved quality of life, they have done so for many centuries - trying to artficially arrest it now is asking for trouble.

So I think we can summarise as follows: HS2, regardless of what benefits it may or may not bring to the railway network, will do absolutely nothing to achieve regional re-balancing, so long as the British economy and administrative system remains concentrated in London to its current ludicrous degree. Instead, it will facilitate London's cont8nued growth at the expense of the rest of the country by turning it into a gigantic dormitory subyrb and giving business further reasons to.shut down provincal operations and move them to London.

Mind you, some on here seem to think that all of that is a good thing.
Because there are no options that are capable of arresting London's growth without causing massive economic damage to the country.
Alpha World Cities have enormous agglomeration benefits that are not easily overcome - short of introducing Stalin-esque internal passports where anyone found outside their designated work area without a permit is dragged off to the gulag, there is not much you can do.

London isn't really outcompeting other cities if the government keep investing in such a way that it becomes the only game in town so to say.

The Government invests in London because that is where the good returns are - it is a perfectly logical move.
If it invests £1 in London it gets more than £1 in the future for more investment, some of which is expended in the provinces.
If it invests £1 building a train station in Maryport (reductio ad absurdum here!) then it will get much less than £1 back and that money is gone.

An Alpha World City is one of the most wealth creating things ever concieved in human history, to hamstring it in an attempt to hold the country's economic map in the past is madness.
We have to learn to live with it unless you want to sacrifice its enormous economic potential on the altar of historical regional divisions.
 
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Chester1

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The Government invests in London because that is where the good returns are - it is a perfectly logical move.
If it invests £1 in London it gets more than £1 in the future for more investment, some of which is expended in the provinces.
If it invests £1 building a train station in Maryport (reductio ad absurdum here!) then it will get much less than £1 back and that money is gone.

An Alpha World City is one of the most wealth creating things ever concieved in human history, to hamstring it in an attempt to hold the country's economic map in the past is madness.
We have to learn to live with it unless you want to sacrifice its enormous economic potential on the altar of historical regional divisions.

It is only logical to prioritise London in the short term. Over the long term the city is becoming unaffordable to live in and many people have a reduced choice of work if they are not prepared to live in London.

London centric policy is about more than just money. There are examples when supporting the provinces and regional cities would save money but do not happen due to the London centric mindset of decision makers. People have mentioned in this thread that many civil service jobs have been moved out of London but there are still approximately 150,000 in London. The government is in the middle of a huge program to sell 100-125 year leases on most of its property in Westminster but instead of moving to other cities the work is being relocated to new hub offices in places like Croydon, Canary Wharf and Stratford. Hopefully when the leases for the hubs are up for renewal in 15 to 30 years time moving to other cities will be a smaller step than today. 150,000 civil servants could comfortably be reduced by 2/3rds without moving parliament or department HQs out of London. If it was part of a long term plan most of it could be done through a London recruitment freeze and natural wastage. The BBC and Channel Four (its owned by the government) could be forced to move most of their staff out of London too. It would reduce housing problems in London and therefore benefit it too. If a public sector job doesn't need to be based in London (or its commuter belt) then it shouldn't be.

More on topic - I am not at all convinced HS2 will train money from the rest of the country, it will make living and working outside of London more appealing for those who need to be able to have regular meetings in London.
 

HSTEd

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It is only logical to prioritise London in the short term. Over the long term the city is becoming unaffordable to live in and many people have a reduced choice of work if they are not prepared to live in London.
Well that is simply an argument for improved transport-links in and out of London isn't it?
The city is unaffordable to live in because it's growth has been artificially constricted by the madness that is the Green-belt, there should not be London Underground stations adjacent to open fields - but there are.
London centric policy is about more than just money. There are examples when supporting the provinces and regional cities would save money but do not happen due to the London centric mindset of decision makers. People have mentioned in this thread that many civil service jobs have been moved out of London but there are still approximately 150,000 in London.
The government is in the middle of a huge program to sell 100-125 year leases on most of its property in Westminster but instead of moving to other cities the work is being relocated to new hub offices in places like Croydon, Canary Wharf and Stratford. Hopefully when the leases for the hubs are up for renewal in 15 to 30 years time moving to other cities will be a smaller step than today. 150,000 civil servants could comfortably be reduced by 2/3rds without moving parliament or department HQs out of London.

How much would we actually save by moving from places like Croydon to the centre of Manchester or wherever?
Unless you literally move into the middle of nowhere the 'cheaper office space' in the regional cities is no cheaper than that available in outer London.
Nevermind that having half your department hundreds of miles from the rest is going to cause all sorts of interesting problems.
If it was part of a long term plan most of it could be done through a London recruitment freeze and natural wastage. The BBC and Channel Four (its owned by the government) could be forced to move most of their staff out of London too. It would reduce housing problems in London and therefore benefit it too. If a public sector job doesn't need to be based in London (or its commuter belt) then it shouldn't be.
And this will help with the ongoing public section retention crisis how?
Telling staff that they will move away from their they have lived, potentially for decades, and that if they do not they will be disposed of and replaced?
The loss of experienced personnel and early retirees would be devestating.
Nevermind that scattering these things to the winds is going to cause massive issues with actually improving cooperation and productivity in departments.

We can't simply move people like cattle - just look at the problems the BBC had when it moved people to Salford Quays.

More on topic - I am not at all convinced HS2 will train money from the rest of the country, it will make living and working outside of London more appealing for those who need to be able to have regular meetings in London.
The conception of what 'London' is has steadily grown throughout it's history.
A thousand years ago you could walk across it in relatively short order - you obviously cannot do that now.
I think, if transport speeds continue to increase (as heralded by HS2 and it's successors) that eventually the conception of London will expand so that it has reached the sea in virtually every direction (or even potentially expanded into it given the developments in land reclamation!).

HS2 will start the process of bringing all of England east of Bristol and south of Manchester into the fold - and that cultural conception will strengthen over time, unless someone tries to stop it in an attempt to preserve the (largely) imagined old glories of the Victorian era or the early 20th Century.
 

PR1Berske

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London sucks the money from everyone, everywhere. Defending London as you do is abhorrent because it implies that you don't care about anywhere, or anyone, beyond London.

I am a proud Northerner. I hate London. I hate that it takes all the money, all the investment, all the railways, all the roads. You seem to celebrate the idea of London expanding to the seas: I spit in those seas.

We need money and investment up here. Cut London away, send it off on its own, and take the blasted HS2 with it. The North needs money. The North can do without London.
 

yorksrob

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The Netherlands seem to do fine without everything being sucked into Amsterdam, so I don't see why we have to become a city state.
 

Chester1

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Well that is simply an argument for improved transport-links in and out of London isn't it?
The city is unaffordable to live in because it's growth has been artificially constricted by the madness that is the Green-belt, there should not be London Underground stations adjacent to open fields - but there are.

How much would we actually save by moving from places like Croydon to the centre of Manchester or wherever?
Unless you literally move into the middle of nowhere the 'cheaper office space' in the regional cities is no cheaper than that available in outer London.
Nevermind that having half your department hundreds of miles from the rest is going to cause all sorts of interesting problems.

And this will help with the ongoing public section retention crisis how?
Telling staff that they will move away from their they have lived, potentially for decades, and that if they do not they will be disposed of and replaced?
The loss of experienced personnel and early retirees would be devestating.
Nevermind that scattering these things to the winds is going to cause massive issues with actually improving cooperation and productivity in departments.

We can't simply move people like cattle - just look at the problems the BBC had when it moved people to Salford Quays.

Even outer London locations such as Croydon are significantly more expensive than regional city centres. The London and outer London allowance for each staff adds up to. I know my own job pays nearly £4000 more at an outer London hub. The public sector has a recruitment crisis but the civil service does not. Vacancies and secondments are very competitive. BBC move to Salford Quays has been a success despite attenpts to down play it by London based think tanks and media.
 

HSTEd

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The Netherlands seem to do fine without everything being sucked into Amsterdam, so I don't see why we have to become a city state.

A very large fraction of the Dutch economy is focussed into the Randstad - which is something like 90km North to South.
Which is actually surprisingly similar to the East-West dimension of the London Urban Zone, which is often considered to stretch as far as from Slough to Southend.

Just because it is not a typical city with typical city structures does not mean it is not de facto a city state.
 

HSTEd

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London sucks the money from everyone, everywhere. Defending London as you do is abhorrent because it implies that you don't care about anywhere, or anyone, beyond London.
And where does the money come from pray-tell?
Why should Londoners be squeezed till their pips-squeak for the benefit of people in the North?

We need money and investment up here. Cut London away, send it off on its own, and take the blasted HS2 with it. The North needs money. The North can do without London.
And the per capita richest part of the economy vanishes, and suddenly there is no public money for the infrastructure you demand?
You complain that you only get crumbs from the table, but in order to get those there has to be something on the table.
 

jon0844

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HS2 only serves London Euston. It will take 20 years and 40bn to save 10 minutes off a banker's commute. In the shires, the forgotten north, Wales , and Anglia, HS2 helps Nobody.

I think you're missing a trick with your emotive comment. I am not sure bankers are so hated anymore, so maybe you should change to Tory MP's commute, or maybe go for something even more emotive, like an Islamic terrorist or something.

And I'd rather like us to get on with HS2 so we can see how that improves things and then crack on with HS3 and 4 to solve other problems.

Britain used to quite like pushing boundaries and excelling at things. Now it seems we want to go backwards in just about everything.
 

markydh

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If I'm being blasé about it being ok if towns turn into dormitories, then you are also being blasé about forcing people to remain in small scale job markets where it is easy for a handful of medium-large employers to artificial depress wages for their own benefit.
If the only major employer in town only pays minimum wage and is cavalier about terms and conditions, you have to work there unless you can commute to someplace else.
Because your house won't simply move to a new town.
It traps people and allows unscrupulous businessmen to exploit them.

Why? People move to cities because of (overall!) improved quality of life, they have done so for many centuries - trying to artficially arrest it now is asking for trouble.
No, people moved from rural areas to towns, which grew to become cities. HS2 will only benefit those lucky enough to live up to and including Leeds and Manchester, and only really if they are going to London. Travel times will actually increase using existing infrastructure further into the North West, with absolutely no regional benefit. North of Leeds, the same is true. Someone travelling from, say, Durham to Leeds to work, will have a journey of exactly the same time. Again, no benefit at all. HS2 is needed for capacity reasons. To pretend it will bring any other kind of benefit is at best highly speculative. Very few people in my city, Newcastle, will really benefit from a slightly faster journey to London. We would benefit from the kind of local public transport infrastructure (particularly buses into the suburbs and wider north east) enjoyed in the capital. Social mobility is one the great myths of capitalism. It doesn't happen on any great scale, and hasn't since the end of the industrial revolution.
 

Chester1

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And where does the money come from pray-tell?
Why should Londoners be squeezed till their pips-squeak for the benefit of people in the North?


And the per capita richest part of the economy vanishes, and suddenly there is no public money for the infrastructure you demand?
You complain that you only get crumbs from the table, but in order to get those there has to be something on the table.

We live in a democracy and London and its commuter belt is heavily out numbered by the rest of the UK. The disconnect between London and the rest of England (and Wales) was higlighted by the vote to leave the EU. Londoners and especially the London elite seem to be struggling to get their heads around having a major decision take place against their wishes. Unless the UK becomes more economically the divisions will grow. For the record, I voted remain.
 

HSTEd

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We live in a democracy and London and its commuter belt is heavily out numbered by the rest of the UK. The disconnect between London and the rest of England (and Wales) was higlighted by the vote to leave the EU. Londoners and especially the London elite seem to be struggling to get their heads around having a major decision take place against their wishes. Unless the UK becomes more economically the divisions will grow. For the record, I voted remain.
London and the commuter belt is growing rather more rapidly than the general population and already represents something approaching a quarter of the entire national population.

The disconnect I believe is cultural in nature and would require decades, if not centuries, of cultural homogenisation to erase.
However, one thing that makes such stresses worse is economic problems, so we must do everything possible to improve economic output so that we have more 'crumbs' to spend on disadvantaged areas.
Trying to make London poorer by denying it needed infrastructure for it's own prosperity is just going to make everyone poorer in the long run since London is the economic breadbasket of the country and will be for the forseable future.

No, people moved from rural areas to towns, which grew to become cities. HS2 will only benefit those lucky enough to live up to and including Leeds and Manchester, and only really if they are going to London.
You mean the areas where huge numbers of people actually live?

London, West Midlands, Manchester and Leeds constitute a very large fraction of the total national population - indeed I think that will be getting on for 25 million people, or half the entire population of England.
We would benefit from the kind of local public transport infrastructure (particularly buses into the suburbs and wider north east) enjoyed in the capital. Social mobility is one the great myths of capitalism. It doesn't happen on any great scale, and hasn't since the end of the industrial revolution.

Increae your population by an order of magnitude and you can have that?
But public transport quality inevitably scales in relation to the population of the area it is serving.
 

B&I

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If I'm being blasé about it being ok if towns turn into dormitories, then you are also being blasé about forcing people to remain in small scale job markets where it is easy for a handful of medium-large employers to artificial depress wages for their own benefit.
If the only major employer in town only pays minimum wage and is cavalier about terms and conditions, you have to work there unless you can commute to someplace else.
Because your house won't simply move to a new town.
It traps people and allows unscrupulous businessmen to exploit them.

Why? People move to cities because of (overall!) improved quality of life, they have done so for many centuries - trying to artficially arrest it now is asking for trouble.


Because there are no options that are capable of arresting London's growth without causing massive economic damage to the country.
Alpha World Cities have enormous agglomeration benefits that are not easily overcome - short of introducing Stalin-esque internal passports where anyone found outside their designated work area without a permit is dragged off to the gulag, there is not much you can do.



The Government invests in London because that is where the good returns are - it is a perfectly logical move.
If it invests £1 in London it gets more than £1 in the future for more investment, some of which is expended in the provinces.
If it invests £1 building a train station in Maryport (reductio ad absurdum here!) then it will get much less than £1 back and that money is gone.

An Alpha World City is one of the most wealth creating things ever concieved in human history, to hamstring it in an attempt to hold the country's economic map in the past is madness.
We have to learn to live with it unless you want to sacrifice its enormous economic potential on the altar of historical regional divisions.


There are millions of bog standard jobs which are in London which could be located anywhere. Even the prestigious ones have no need to be there. Many of my friends who 'work' in London get most stuff done over computers and phones from home and loathe actually going to the office.

London is 'booming' because 'captains of industry' and senior civil servants like living in and around it and direct investment accordingly, and because of people swallowing this 'Alpha World City' tripe. And pretty much the whole population suffers, whether from paying the obscene costs of living around or commuting to London, or from the economic damage this does to the rest of the country.

If the only viable model is concentrating an entire country's economic development in one place, can you explain why more successful countries like Germany have not followed the same path?
 

markydh

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Increae your population by an order of magnitude and you can have that?
But public transport quality inevitably scales in relation to the population of the area it is serving.
The fact the North East gets five times less spending per head than London and the South East rather suggests that population has absolutely nothing to do with it! Something even vaguely approaching parity would have massive positive effects on the region.
 

Chester1

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London has 9 million people and its commuter belt is another 4 million. Thats 13 million out of a UK wide population of over 65m. Londons commuter zone includes 20% or less of the UK population. It won't reach 25% for at least 15 to 20 years. Brexit will alter the economic balance against London even if everyone gets poorer.
 

HSTEd

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The fact the North East gets five times less spending per head than London and the South East rather suggests that population has absolutely nothing to do with it! Something even vaguely approaching parity would have massive positive effects on the region.
It is nowhere near as simple as those headline figures make it sound and you know it!
Leaving aside that 'transport investment' figures normaly exclude the titanic sums of money spent propping up Northern Rail and Merseyrail, you have to spend the money where people are.

The fact is that it is very difficult to find schemes in the North that actually have good BCR.
And spending money on low-BCR schemes simply to equalise per head spending would be enormously wasteful.
There are millions of bog standard jobs which are in London which could be located anywhere. Even the prestigious ones have no need to be there. Many of my friends who 'work' in London get most stuff done over computers and phones from home and loathe actually going to the office.
And how will they feel when you inform them that, by order of the state, they and their families are being compulsarily relocated to Maryport in aid of the glorious and amazing objective of regional equality?
Why do jobs need to be outside London?
London is 'booming' because 'captains of industry' and senior civil servants like living in and around it and direct investment accordingly, and because of people swallowing this 'Alpha World City' tripe. And pretty much the whole population suffers, whether from paying the obscene costs of living around or commuting to London, or from the economic damage this does to the rest of the country.
If people want to work in London, it is the Government's duty to ensure that they can do so. Not try to forcibly relocate jobs to areas that the Government finds more desirable for whatever reason.

Large cities produce well known agglomeration effects that improve economic growth and tend to produce better qualities of life.
Otherwise they never would have survived the coming of the car and massive urban sprawl.

People who claim the countryside is better to live in have never experienced having no buses on Sundays, or a bus service on weekdays that is so sparse as to be nearly useless.
Or the reality of having nowhere to undertake any recreational activties beyond hill-walking, or having a tiny choice of employers who take advantage of an effectively captive workforce to depress wages.

Town living is often romanticised but to be honest I find little to recommend it.

If the only viable model is concentrating an entire country's economic development in one place, can you explain why more successful countries like Germany have not followed the same path?

Leaving aside that Germany is drastically larger than the UK, and that for various political factors has developed very differently (it is likely not in equilibrium as Berlin/East Germany was effectively isolated from West Germany etc) - the three major agglomerations of industrial output in the former West Germany, Hamburg and south German industrial complexes around Rhine-Ruhr and Munich/Stuttgart etc are seperated by something like 450-500km.

Which means that we might expect a second city complex in the UK to appear around about the north of Newcastle - it is pretty much the only direction in the UK where 500km from London does not put you in the sea.

England is basically only big enough for one dominant, or maybe two dominant cities.
 
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PR1Berske

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"Why do jobs need to be outside London?" you ask.

Because there are communities, families, infrastructures, economies, lives, histories, futures, opportunities, buildings, available land, available people, stories, myths, days, nights, and love outside London.

Reducing England to just "London", without English literature, language, dialect, cuisine, laughter, hope, beauty, elbow grease, humour, brute force, smoke, or hefty bosoms, reduces a nation to mere numbers on a balance sheet.

The Netherlands is not a city state. Neither is England.
 

B&I

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It is nowhere near as simple as those headline figures make it sound and you know it!
Leaving aside that 'transport investment' figures normaly exclude the titanic sums of money spent propping up Northern Rail and Merseyrail, you have to spend the money where people are.

The fact is that it is very difficult to find schemes in the North that actually have good BCR.
And spending money on low-BCR schemes simply to equalise per head spending would be enormously wasteful.

And how will they feel when you inform them that, by order of the state, they and their families are being compulsarily relocated to Maryport in aid of the glorious and amazing objective of regional equality?
Why do jobs need to be outside London?

If people want to work in London, it is the Government's duty to ensure that they can do so. Not try to forcibly relocate jobs to areas that the Government finds more desirable for whatever reason.

Large cities produce well known agglomeration effects that improve economic growth and tend to produce better qualities of life.
Otherwise they never would have survived the coming of the car and massive urban sprawl.

People who claim the countryside is better to live in have never experienced having no buses on Sundays, or a bus service on weekdays that is so sparse as to be nearly useless.
Or the reality of having nowhere to undertake any recreational activties beyond hill-walking, or having a tiny choice of employers who take advantage of an effectively captive workforce to depress wages.

Town living is often romanticised but to be honest I find little to recommend it.



Leaving aside that Germany is drastically larger than the UK, and that for various political factors has developed very differently (it is likely not in equilibrium as Berlin/East Germany was effectively isolated from West Germany etc) - the three major agglomerations of industrial output in the former West Germany, Hamburg and south German industrial complexes around Rhine-Ruhr and Munich/Stuttgart etc are seperated by something like 450-500km.

Which means that we might expect a second city complex in the UK to appear around about the north of Newcastle - it is pretty much the only direction in the UK where 500km from London does not put you in the sea.

England is basically only big enough for one dominant, or maybe two dominant cities.


What has Germany's size, or different history, got to do with anything? If you're right, and agglomeration theory infallibly predicts the success of failure of an economy, Germany should be a basket case. Has it ever struck you that the popularity of agglomeration economics among the London comentariat might be just a way of justifying the status quo, and their own highly paid jobs?

How many people 'want' to work in London, and how many people have been forced there by the ludicrous over-concentration of jobs and economic activity? What about the people who are forced to leave pretty much everywhere else in Britain, not because by going to London they can increase their wages, but because it has taken such a disproportionate share of jobs that they have to go there to find one? Have you ever questionned what the greater cost of living would do to those higher wages anyway?
 

HSTEd

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What has Germany's size, or different history, got to do with anything?
The development of cities throughout human civilisation, with only minor reversals caused by political upheavel is for the number of 'major' settlements to reduce, with the hinterland occupied by each growing as they do so.
It now appears throughout much of the developed world that major cities have serious difficulties developing within a few hundred kilometres of each other. The distance of ~500km or so actually fits relatively well in several cases.
Germany is also a special case in that it spent much of the second half of the 20th Century divided into two different and largely seperated states, with Berlin being another special case that means that the equilibrium model does not really apply to relationships relating to Berlin.

If you're right, and agglomeration theory infallibly predicts the success of failure of an economy, Germany should be a basket case.
Not really, since agglomeration effects are only part of the story.
But there is a lot of work that suggests that such effects are real and significant.

Has it ever struck you that the popularity of agglomeration economics among the London comentariat might be just a way of justifying the status quo, and their own highly paid jobs?[/quote]
Have you ever struck you that the unpopularity of agglomeration economics amongst Northern orientated commentators might just be a way of justifying their demand that London be starved of investment to remove the chip on their shoulder - especially felt by people who have opinions similar to those PR1Berske has expressed in this thread.
How many people 'want' to work in London, and how many people have been forced there by the ludicrous over-concentration of jobs and economic activity? What about the people who are forced to leave pretty much everywhere else in Britain, not because by going to London they can increase their wages, but because it has taken such a disproportionate share of jobs that they have to go there to find one? Have you ever questionned what the greater cost of living would do to those higher wages anyway?
Which is why I spend my time supporting mechanisms to reduce the cost of living, both generally and in London, and enabling people to work in London without necessarily having to live in areas with London-type house prices?
"Why do jobs need to be outside London?" you ask.

Because there are communities, families, infrastructures, economies, lives, histories, futures, opportunities, buildings, available land, available people, stories, myths, days, nights, and love outside London.

But all those things exist inside London as well?
The Netherlands is not a city state. Neither is England.
Then what is a state that has 40% its entire population and proportionally more of its economy in a box that covers ~20% of it's land area, including a giant nature reserve/farming reserve in the middle of it?
 
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yorksrob

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A very large fraction of the Dutch economy is focussed into the Randstad - which is something like 90km North to South.
Which is actually surprisingly similar to the East-West dimension of the London Urban Zone, which is often considered to stretch as far as from Slough to Southend.

Just because it is not a typical city with typical city structures does not mean it is not de facto a city state.

I'm guessing that the Randstat is centered on numerous urban centres.

Economies tend to prosper far more in areas such as Germany with lots of strong commercial/cultural and academic centres, rather than those which over centralise, and overspecialise as has been the case here with London and financial services.
 

B&I

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The development of cities throughout human civilisation, with only minor reversals caused by political upheavel is for the number of 'major' settlements to reduce, with the hinterland occupied by each growing as they do so.
It now appears throughout much of the developed world that major cities have serious difficulties developing within a few hundred kilometres of each other. The distance of ~500km or so actually fits relatively well in several cases.
Germany is also a special case in that it spent much of the second half of the 20th Century divided into two different and largely seperated states, with Berlin being another special case that means that the equilibrium model does not really apply to relationships relating to Berlin.


Not really, since agglomeration effects are only part of the story.
But there is a lot of work that suggests that such effects are real and significant.

Has it ever struck you that the popularity of agglomeration economics among the London comentariat might be just a way of justifying the status quo, and their own highly paid jobs?
Have you ever struck you that the unpopularity of agglomeration economics amongst Northern orientated commentators might just be a way of justifying their demand that London be starved of investment to remove the chip on their shoulder - especially felt by people who have opinions similar to those PR1Berske has expressed in this thread.

Which is why I spend my time supporting mechanisms to reduce the cost of living, both generally and in London, and enabling people to work in London without necessarily having to live in areas with London-type house prices?


But all those things exist inside London as well?

Then what is a state that has 40% its entire population and proportionally more of its economy in a box that covers ~20% of it's land area, including a giant nature reserve/farming reserve in the middle of it?[/QUOTE]


I've a simple solution which will help reduce the cost of living in London - stop draining so many jobs away from everywhere else and into it, so that so many people aren't forced to move there. (I note, btw, that you have no response to the question why so many people should be forced to uproot themselves and move to London.)

Since 2010, only 2 cities in Britain have seen an increase in public sector employment. One was Manchester. Can you guess where the other was?

I know your response to questions about why everything has to be concentrated in London tends to be 'because I say so' (or dressed up slightly, 'because agglomeration theory says so', but can you please explain why hundreds of thousands of civil servants need to be in London, including many in very junior roles?

Also, would you like to explain, if our London-centric economic model is so obviously successful, why we have the lowest productivity figures in the developed world?
 

PR1Berske

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Well @HSTEd I disagree with you on almost every single point but thank you for quite the debate!
 
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