What's the role for creatives in devolution?
Plus industrial strategy, community resilience, and unemployment
I joined a panel at Durham Book Festival at the weekend, courtesty of the good people at New Writing North, who had commissioned me to write an essay for a series they’ve published called North East Now.
You can read the essay here, along with the other commissions from my fellow panellists Richard Benson and Louise Powell.
We were there to speak about devolution and the opportunities it presented for the region, sat against the context of how the North East presents itself and what a joint identity for it looks like.
It was a wide-ranging discussion.
I spoke about masculine identity and the importance of community to connect people to their potential and showcase what is possible.
Richard talked about the importance of getting beyond the thin symbolism of the region to something more subtantial, and how the Northumbrian Enlightenment - the period of the 19th century where the region led the world in connecting scientific and industrial innovations together - provides a model for the future too.
Louise explained what she’d found on visiting Sacriston in Co. Durham, and seeing how while the social infrastructure of the former mining community had changed, with many of the assets gone, the ethos remained.
Given it was a book festival, and there were a bunch of writers on the stage, the undercurrent of the conversation was the role for writers and other creatives.
I think that role is a clear one.
There’s a need for a shared narrative, and compelling storytelling, which galvanises people together around a vision of the future for the North East.
I was at Generator’s conference a couple of weeks ago, where one of the topics of discussion was music as a policy priority.
Kim McGuinness suggested we need to make it so exciting here that people don’t want to leave - whether they grew up here, or are visiting, or are thinking about investing.
Our actions define the likelihood of that, but so too does the way we present ourselves to the world.
We need a groundswell of literature, music and art which brick-by-brick builds us a foundation for that.
That means those writers and musicians and artists need the right environment to do their work - the right support, the right platforms, and the right career pathways to do what they do here in the North East.
Resilience
Health Equity North and the University of Manchester have published joint research on the ability of different communities across the country to deal with prolonged challenges.
The research finds “coastal, rural and areas in the North of England are less able to withstand and recover from adverse events”.
I know. ‘Oh, shit’, right? We’re all three of those.
The research assigns each place a resilience index score out of 100, and the North East ranks second worst with a score of 77.5.
There is also a Local Authority level tool where you can see each areas score. (When I opened it, it started me on Croydon, which is never a good place to start anything.)
What I’ll note from that is that although on average cities are more resilient, that doesn’t hold true of our cities.
Newcastle has a score of 79, which puts it along the second quintile of the least resilient.
North Tyneside, by comparison, is at 92, which puts it in the 4th quintile, and among the most resilient local authorities.
Industrial Strategy
The government has published its green paper on an industrial strategy, which is open for consultation until 24th November.
The paper sets out a plan for the next ten years, which promises stability to help businesses invest, and picks out eight growth-driving sectors in “Advanced Manufacturing, Clean Energy Industries, Creative Industries, Defence, Digital and Technologies, Financial Services, Life Sciences, and Professional and Business Services.”
Future stages of the industrial strategy work will pick up sub-sectors in each of these broad areas.
There’s a strong geographic element to the strategy, as it champions sector clusters as a model to pursue, and talks about the role of devolution in delivering them.
It also borrows heavily from the work of Centre for Cities, which has highlighted the way in which the hinterland surrounding major cities benefits from investment and growth occurring in those cities.
The business secretary Jonathan Reynolds was in the North East this week at a growth summit organised by the Northern Powerhouse Partnership. He said they’d “throw the kitchen sink” at creating growth in the region.
He also promised good news in the investment summit going on nationally. They’ve billed it as a ‘record breaking’ summit which has secured £63bn and 38,000 jobs for the UK. Which makes it sound a bit like a Comic Relief total.
There’s a list of projects which make up that £63bn…only I wouldn’t call them all news, given it includes the £10bn data centre in Blyth, the £8bn for carbon capture projects (including on Teesworks) and £225m for SeAH Wind on Teesside…all of which we know a little about already, or which double down on existing investments.
You can take a look at the consultation questions here.
If you need any help responding to the consultation, let me know on arlen@arlenpettitt.co.uk.
Unemployment
The North East’s ever volatile labour market figures were on display in this month’s publication from the ONS.
The employment rate was up a full percentage point in June-Aug compared to Mar-May, to 70%, but unemployment was up 0.7pp to 5.6%.
Economic inactivity fell by 1.7 percentage points, and now sits at 25.7%.
The region is still out of kilter with the national averages, where employment is 5 percentage points higher, while economic inactivity is lower and unemployment is at 4.0%.
That 4.0% unemployment is often taken to be ‘full employment’, with the difference accounted for through structural issues (i.e. the wrong skills), and age (i.e. lack of understanding of pressures), or frictional (i.e. people looking for the right job, spending time unemployed.)
That’s to say, that number isn’t likely to change all that much, so we’ve got a firm target to aim at.
Working with me
I’m rapidly booking up between now and the end of the year, which is spectacular news for both my mortgage lender and the variety of things Santa’s Workshop will be able to create this year.
If you’d like to chat about the time I do have left available, please do reach out on arlen@arlenpettitt.co.uk.