A new report has predicted that moving 50,000 United Kingdom Public Servants out of London to the north of England could give the region a £3 billion ($A5.3 billion) economic boost.
The report, by the Northern Policy Foundation, said re-locating entire Departments would help reduce the North-South divide and could improve public services over time.
It is proposing moving the Treasury to Leeds, the Home Office to Newcastle and the Department of Health to Liverpool.
The Government has already announced plans to shift 22,000 Public Servants out of London by 2030.
Chancellor of the Exchequer, Rishi Sunak wants to create a campus in the north of England for 750 staff from a range of Government Departments, including the Treasury and the Department for Business.
However, the Foundation, whose board members include a number of Conservative Members of Parliament who were elected in traditionally held Labour seats across the north of England in 2019, said the Government’s vision was not ambitious enough.
MP for Blackpool South, Scott Benton (pictured) said radical steps were needed to spread opportunities and growth more widely.
“Ministers need to learn from the mistakes of the past,” Mr Benton said.
He said the Foundation believed that only a “total re-location of the Whitehall machine” would have the necessary galvanising effect and begin to tackle decades of over-centralisation of decision-making in London.
He noted that while four out of five of the UK’s 456,000 Public Servants worked outside London, many of them were in junior positions at the Department of Work and Pensions and Revenue and Customs.
The Foundation has identified 49,500 jobs which it believed could be moved to different regions by matching the needs of individual Departments with areas’ economic and employment strengths, their digital connectivity and other factors, such as house prices.
Its blueprint would see a series of new Departmental clusters in the north-west, in locations such as Lancaster (Education), Preston (Defence), Salford (Culture) and Manchester (Justice and Courts).
London, 17 January 2021
