The United Kingdom has always been a divided land. Today, England has some of the highest levels of regional disparity of any leading nation.

Regional leaders want to see investment focused on local transport and closing the skills gap, but they face a decades long struggle.

Individual countries in the union were shaped by ancient invasions of Romans and Anglo-Saxons. Within England, the settlement of much of the country by the Vikings established a boundary between the northern Danelaw and southern Wessex and Mercia.

Divisions in the economy have more recent roots. The industrial revolution and the birth of the British Empire saw political and financial control centralised in London. Provincial towns developed local economies that each, in their own ways, supported trade or manufacturing.

Atlantic trade flowed through western ports like Liverpool and Bristol. Steel was forged in Sheffield, ships built in Teesside, cotton processed in Manchester and Lancashire. A network of railways and canals was developed to transport these goods and commodities around the country, and out to the world.

By the second half of the 20th century, this economic system had been in place for two centuries, and had raised living standards across the country. But the world, and England, was changing. The old order, with trade conducted and coordinated through a single metropole, was falling apart around the world. 

Consumers were no longer happy with bikes from Nottingham or pottery from Stoke, but wanted cars and fridges, smartphones and digital services, which required complex global supply chains.

Investors looked increasingly to a world of free trade, directing finance wherever cheap labour and commodities could be found.

As the economy in London and the surrounding counties surged, a wave of crises hit the regions.

By 1963, motorways were supplanting rail, and the Beeching Report recommended halving the number of stations, and scrapping thousands of miles of railways. 

State-owned enterprises, in mining and steel production, went into decline. Workers took to the picket lines, in a series of long and disruptive strikes.

A long journey ahead

Britain is not alone in seeing disparities between regions. One of the most well known examples is that of Germany in the 1990s. With the collapse of the Soviet Union and its Western satellites, one German nation needed to be built, out of two states that had for decades been on the frontline of the Cold War.

John Rayson is managing director for the North at Faithful and Gould. Over a three decade career in engineering, he’s had a first hand view of how countries have fought to reduce regional disparities.

“The concept of regional disparities and regional rebalancing isn’t something that’s specific to the UK. We’ve seen other countries, like France and Germany, Japan and the US, over recent times, embark on similar regional rebalancing programmes. The challenge that we have in the UK at the moment is that we are recognised as having the greatest regional disparities across all of the developed nations,” he says.

“We’ve got to be realistic about the timescales on delivering against some of these ambitious rebalancing programmes. In Germany, it took 15 years to address unemployment, and a further 15 years to bring it back as a performing region that was closer to the national average. 30 years is a long time.”

Attention, but little focus

British politicians first started to pay attention to the problem of regional disparities in the 1990s, as the impact of globalisation on local communities became apparent.

The Major, Blair and Brown governments took hesitant steps to devolve power to local authorities, headed by local mayors. These were able to bring more local control to questions of transport and business development.

More recently, the Northern Powerhouse programme focussed on reinvigorating business and transport in former industrial cities. And national projects, planned by central government in London’s Whitehall, like the HS2 high speed rail line and the Transpennine Route Upgrade, aimed to improve rail connections between cities.

“In the UK, we were in a different part of the economic cycle eight years ago when the concept of the Northern Powerhouse was instigated by George Osborne. It was quite a buoyant economy. And so I think that places us in a different starting point now.”

The integration of national planning with local requirements has not always gone smoothly. To better understand what local regional leaders want for their communities, Atkins, with support from the Northern Powerhouse Partnership and the University of Durham’s Business School, commissioned independent research company Trajectory to ask them their views. The results of the survey have recently been published.

“Control by Whitehall is seen by many across the Northern Powerhouse as being a very limiting factor,” says Rayson. “Part of the problem is the people in Whitehall, they rarely come out of Whitehall, to see what’s needed. It’s not about having complete control of regional taxes. It’s about having control of the investments, so they are wisely spent back into the regional economy.

“There’s a number of challenges that sit in the way of delivering a long term investment programme, one of which is undoubtedly the election window. The government can provide stimulus to various programmes, but inevitably, they tend to have to fit within that maximum four year cycle.”

Leaders in the English regions are well aware of the need for a long term focus on achieving Net Zero goals. However, with an economic crisis building, they have more pressing concerns.

“The main aspects that came out that those politicians and regional leaders wanted to see was, one was, a levelling up of people, which is very much about skills academies and providing a platform to train. And then the other aspect was the infrastructure elements of connecting the communities and providing areas for economic growth.”

The challenges the English regions face are multifaceted. Businesses need transport links and a skilled workforce if they are to establish themselves. Local communities, and young people in particular, want fulfilling careers, but they also need good public transport links to get to those jobs, if they are to stay in the region.

Each of these challenges adds complexity to the task of regional rebalancing. But, taken together, and set against the backdrop of climate change and decarbonisation, they also have scope to form a foundation for growth.

Where there’s muck, there’s brass

Along 10 miles of the river Tees, from Middlesbrough inland, to Redcar on the North Sea coast, more than 90 steel foundries once lit up the skies and put cash into local pockets. From here, steel structures were fabricated and sent around the world. This month, one of the last major structures from this era, the Redcar blast furnace, was demolished by contractors Thompsons of Prudhoe.

“It’s got a really long history,” says James Rose, a director at Atkins whose responsibilities include regional development. 

“Large steelworks formed on the south bank of the River Tees from Middlesbrough down to Redcar. Steel and iron production and manufacturing, exporting globally, made a significant contribution to the steel industry in the UK, with, at its peak, about 40,000 jobs. 

“Some really famous landmarks have been supplied by steel from the area so for example, the Sydney Harbour Bridge, the Tyne bridge and Auckland Harbour Bridge were all manufactured at steel works on Teesside.”

In the 1990s, global competition started to impact the area. Steel prices dropped, and other cities around the world were better able to compete for jobs. By the millennium, the number of people employed in the steel works had more than halved, to 18,000. And soon, steel production ceased entirely.

As energy production in the North Sea switches to renewables, a new development, Teesworks, will bring new jobs to the area, focussed on this new economy. Nearby, a new free port, Teesport, aims to bring cargo and wind turbine components to the area. And local and regional transport will, if projects are completed, link businesses and communities here to the rest of the UK

“It is a fantastic programme of works for the area.  With about 4,500 acres of brownfield site, It’s the largest such development in Europe. The aspiration is to create around 20,000 jobs. We’ve already created about 1,000 from industries which have been springing up in and around Teesworks

“We’ve had around about £200 hundred million investment so far to remediate the site, to demolish some of the existing steelworks facilities

“We’ve attracted net zero clients, commercial clients, offshore wind, so in line with the vision of net zero by 2050 for the UK, Teesworks plays right into achieving that objective from a regional perspective. 

“SeAH is building monopole facilities for offshore wind. The chance for international and UK companies to take advantage of a free port, and access to the North Sea in particular, is really exciting.”

On track for growth?

“The aspiration is that we retain our talents and skills in the region, and people who have got those careers can see a career and a life in the Northeast rather than moving to a different part of the UK or overseas.”

Challenges remain though. One of the main concerns of local leaders surveyed by Trajectory was around skills. While many communities have a long industrial heritage, many who acquired their skills in the region, have now left for jobs elsewhere. And the types of skills needed are changing.  

And for those businesses and workers that remain, poor transport links stifle opportunity and limit potential.

“I get involved in quite a number of external meetings, such as conferences with mayors and local government officials,” says Rose. “With the Northern Powerhouse there’s a strategy which the government created, seven or eight years ago now, but really local leaders have not seen some of that investment.

“So for example, an extension to HS2 is not happening now; Northern Power Rail, investment in that, is not really going to happen. But what we have seen on Teeside, to the credit of the mayor of Teesside, is a significant investment in Teesworks. 

“But a real issue remains around investment in transportation networks to facilitate economic growth, which has a massive impact on social value.”

Building skills, building opportunities

People are equally important.  Many locals have turned away from a career in industry and engineering, as opportunities have diminished. Others have taken their skills to jobs elsewhere in the UK, or overseas.

“The mayor and the mayoral authority have been looking at the skills mix and working closely with local universities and colleges and schools,” says Rose. “They’re able to then start to map out what some of these career opportunities might look like in the future, which then gives opportunities for university students to be able to plan what type of careers they’re looking to develop. 

“it’s a real challenge for the area, because a lot of the people with skills and talent that we have in the region, they don’t see the opportunity locally, so they go and work in in London or Manchester or Leeds or Sheffield and, and hopefully the work that we’re doing on Teesworks, will start to attract that those skills back.”

Building the skills needed by new smart and sustainable industries needs to start early. That’s the challenge Jess Bates is working on. She is the Network Rail Client Account Director at Atkins, and the Equality, Diversity and Inclusion lead for the Transpennine Route Upgrade alliance.

Deflected from opportunity

“There was a study undertaken by the National Skills Academy for rail, which indicated some quite shocking statistics,” says Bates. “As the industry looks to concurrently develop the Transpennine Route Upgrade, and HS2, it is forecast to be deficient by up to 16,000 people by 2025.”

For generations, career paths in industrial and mining cities were clear. Young people grew up in communities where there were jobs for life, starting with apprenticeships at 14, and providing work and progression all the way through to retirement.  With the disappearance of these ways of working, young working class people across the country share a similar challenge: how to even imagine what career jobs may be available to them, what skills they will need, and how to access opportunities.

Many of those industrial era ‘jobs for life’ were gender segregated. This sort of restriction is now understood to be discriminatory and to restrict individual potential. Such divisions limit organisations’ ability to recruit from the widest possible pool of skilled candidates, and to support employees to build skills.

But perceptions of who might be suitable for jobs in construction and engineering are still shaped by these old ideas. Some groups of potential employees may face specific challenges to working in the sector. If they are not represented among leadership in the sector, those challenges may not be addressed.

Taken together, these challenges and misperceptions deflect people away from a career in engineering, and leave organisations facing a skills gap.

“So what is career deflection? Atkins commissioned a report in 2020, which looked at the prevalence of different protected characteristic groups leaving the industry, and it identified that women, those from ethnic minorities and those with disabilities were more likely to leave engineering than any other population or demographic. 

“And there were a multitude of reasons around that. It could be as a result of barriers to entry in the first place, that the industry doesn’t feel very inclusive. That when people are in the industry, there are very real barriers to progression, things that are prohibiting people from increasing in seniority in the industry, for example. And generally there is a vibe that engineering just isn’t an attractive place to be.”

Imagining success

A first step to filling the skills gap is simply letting people know that they are needed, and that they can flourish in jobs in engineering and construction. That story needs to be told when potential employees are young: young enough for them to not just start building the skills they will need, but to begin imagining themselves in these roles.

“If we think about it through the lens of, absolutely, young careers and creating an industry that young people want to be involved in, and want to seek a career in engineering. I don’t think that storytelling exists. That line of sight isn’t created for young people in conversation when they’re at school, and work experience opportunities often don’t exist in their local community.”

One approach has been to hold STEM fairs and events in schools and colleges. As young people consider A-level or apprenticeship choices, or pick what to study at degree level, these events seek to recruit them to a career in science or engineering. 

But they often come too late. They might provide opportunities for those young people who have started planning for a career in the sector. But they don’t, in themselves, lead enough children to see those paths.

“For any person, regardless of age, it’s so important to see role models and accessible leaders in a position that you can envisage yourself being in,” says Bates, “Whether that’s a woman in a senior leadership position or someone with an invisible disability, or from an ethnic minority background. We need to ensure that all of these people have a platform to speak and talk about their careers”

Leading by example

Bates has been working on new ways to reach children at the start of their education, and to build a platform that will allow engineers from diverse backgrounds to share their experience with educators.

“Atkins have developed a corporate partnership with national education charity Governors for Schools,” says Bates. “What Governors for Schools do as an organisation is match and recruit talented volunteers on to school governing boards, to work with head teachers, to be critical friends and influencers to uplift the education standards of any particular school.

“We’ve made a real conscious effort to make sure that we are listening not just to the deficiencies that currently exist, but are trying to create a work stream of people into engineering as well.”

Working with schools can be a satisfying experience, allowing governors to play a rewarding role in their community. It can also be an opportunity for governors to develop their own skills and experience.

“Governors for Schools have done a piece of research across all of their schools that they work with,” says Bates. “Typically, to be a governor, you contribute about six hours of your time a month. That can include your commitments towards school meetings, going and visiting schools and talking to kids. 

“A lot of schools recognise that they thrive with the important insight and support of governors, and make meetings accessible to the needs of everyone. A lot of governing meetings tend to happen after school hours or in the evening, and these are often hybrid meetings.

“It is a unique and pioneering partnership and I think this, this complete refocus on enriching the curriculum is really exciting for people, not just because it can be galvanising to the relationship we have with the school, but because it can be an incredible personal development opportunity.” 

The impact these governors make will ripple out through their communities, into the wider economy.  Volunteer governors can help show children and young people that engineering can be a rewarding career. In a few years time, today’s pupils will be apprentices and engineering students, ready to use their skills to build a sustainable transport system, bringing rewarding green jobs across the English regions