"The new town designation will make no difference whatsoever to that scheme."
Former GMCA Chief Executive, Eamon Boylan, shortly before his recent, and untimely, passing, on the Victoria North New Town.
From this excellent piece by @joeygardiner1.bsky.social: www.building.co.uk/focus/greate...
📈 Over the last decade, Wakefield has been one of the UK’s cities where output and disposable income have grown faster than the national average.
Read more👇
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📆 Join us on Thursday for the launch of our latest research investigating how density in UK cities compares to counterparts in France and Japan, revealing priority areas for delivering denser housing.
Register your place 👇
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war. Following that logic, London is not a liberal city. It is liberalism. The place itself - with its non-linear streets, its architectural farrago, its chalk-and-cheese neighbourhoods - is what happens when lots of individual choices accrue over centuries. It could not have come from a top-down designer with a single totalising idea. You can see how the place might rankle with the schematically minded. The result is, and always has been, a city with all the right enemies.
Janan Ganesh on London:
Great article by @stephenkb.bsky.social here: www.ft.com/content/b6d2...
The government has made some moves on building high-quality office spaces (£500m). But a larger conversation on cities’ competitive advantage is necessary.
Really well-argued piece - great to see MPs actually using longform to make serious arguments that aren't just voter-babble.
I like trams, and I think we should build more of them, because I am an anti-car urbanist who thinks trams make for more liveable cities because they're car killers.
But 🧵
🎙️The Croydon planning experiment
@andrewcities.bsky.social is joined by Alison Coutinho and Guy Rochez who both worked for Croydon council when they were designing and implementing a new planning strategy to build more homes in the borough.
Give it a listen🎧👇
buff.ly/p6elfKy
Unlocking growth across UK regions means tackling city underperformance.
Manchester, Birmingham and Leeds lag behind European counterparts. Improving their productivity is central to national growth.
Read our reflections🔍👇
Come and shape the future of the Nuffield Foundation.
A new & key leadership role at the UK’s leading independent funder of social & economic research.
We fund evidence, back innovation & support pioneering practice. Join a great team at an exciting moment.
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Updated Northern Growth Strategy out today - www.gov.uk/government/p...
Lots of good to think about. We;ll giving some reactions to this and the Chancellor’s MAIs speech next Tuesday. Details here www.centreforcities.org/event/centre...
NEW: We often hear that Scotland’s more progressive income tax is “driving people out the country.”
New HMRC data shows the opposite. Far more taxpayers are moving to Scotland than leaving it.
Let’s look at the data 🧵
Interesting today programme piece on regional inequality - but I worry we are still fighting old battles
Spatial inequality basically flatlining, the problem is growth - still talking about London as some sort of high growth city makes us complacent
The Chancellor’s Mais Lecture reflects a growing recognition: cities drive growth in a modern economy.
But many UK cities underperform compared to international peers. Closing that gap could add £40bn to the economy.
Read our reflections🔍👇
buff.ly/4dCEVEy
Centre for Cities research found that 57% of the UK's productivity lag compared to leading G7 countries is due to the underperformance of its big cities.
Today, the Chancellor highlighted the importance of closing this gap in order to boost national growth 👇
Powers to acquire land without paying excessive compensation are ALREADY on the statute book from LURA 2023. Labour has not used them because the issue is about funding & financing, and Labour’s approach to use PPP for infrastructure means they cannot be used. www.ft.com/content/3c4e...
For the Industrial Strategy, the implication is straightforward. Policies aimed at providing more capital will only go so far.
The bigger challenge is to build stronger city economies that generate more investment-ready businesses.
The policy debate is often framed as a shortage of investment capital outside the Greater South East.
But the evidence suggests the bigger constraint is the lack of firms that investors want to back.
Investment flows overwhelmingly to the places with the largest concentrations of high-growth, investment-ready firms.
This matters for the Government’s ambition to increase the amount of equity finance being invested in the UK.
Nearly all equity investment in UK flows into cities. London dominates, then Oxford and Cambridge, followed by big cities.
Usual explanation is that pattern reflects where equity investors are based.
But our latest report – Angels’ delights – suggests the story runs in the opposite direction.
IFS correct here: government needs to start thinking seriously about the design of fiscal responses to supply shocks. Otherwise it gets done incoherently and expensively on the hoof, with negative knock on effects. This lesson should have been learned already.
New post just out:
"Fighting back"
Labour is a deep hole, with the Greens now ahead in some polls.
What political strategy do they need to get out of this cycle of decline?
(£/free trial)
open.substack.com/pub/samf/p/f...
Not to overplay (at this point) what they can do but Metro Mayors and City Leaders are ideally placed to deliver improvements that are/would be seen and felt by people where they live and work.
They could/would do more but need government support to do it
New post just out
"Is 'deliverism' dead?"
A guest post from the brilliant @dmk1793.bsky.social on one of the main points of strategic confusion within the Labour party.
Is winning just about delivery or more about narrative?
(£/free trial)
open.substack.com/pub/samf/p/i...
Alongside fusion of powers across track and train, Great British Railways could put mayors on track to have European-style powers over local trains.
Quick thread on my latest piece setting out what the Railways Bill could mean for greater control of commuter rail in England's secondary cities. 🧵
📅 In conversation with @mayorofgm.bsky.social
Joins us to hear from the Mayor on Greater Manchester’s journey so far, lessons for other mayoral strategic authorities, his ambitions for Greater Manchester and the English devolution agenda more broadly👇
www.centreforcities.org/event/manche...
‘Every hermit crab in the bucket benefited from vacancy chains when a ‘luxury’ shell was dropped into the mix’
