Spend any time at a political event in the North of England and the chances are you’ll hear the Treasury – which holds the purse strings for all government spending – referred to in less-than-flattering terms.
The widely-held view is that our region has been held back by decades of Treasury orthodoxy dictating that public funds and investment are better directed to the already-affluent London and the South East.
And it was a theme hammered home by Ben Houchen on Friday at the launch of the True North think-tank, where the Tees Valley mayor suggested the North is owed “reparations” from the rest of the UK after decades of under-investment.
And he had a specific example of how the Treasury’s view of investment in the regions had apparently filtered through to the Office for Investment (OFI), the government unit set up to promote the UK to investors and businesses around the world.
The Conservative mayor told the audience in Newcastle that leaders in the North East were hoping for more investment from oil-rich Saudi Arabia, adding the money that’s already flowed into Newcastle United FC and from Saudi firms like SABIC and Aramco.
But he said: “I know there was a meeting with the Saudis [and OFI] last week. The Government said to them ‘We don’t want to talk to you about the North East. Don’t go to the North East. Come and talk to us about the Oxford-Cambridge Arc [the area between Oxford, Milton Keynes and Cambridge]’.
“So once you have the Treasury, who do not have that strategic push to say ‘invest in the North’, the departments and all of the systems default.
“So when you‘ve got the Saudis who are desperate to invest in the North East of England, they keep talking to me and [North East mayor] Kim McGuinness saying ‘Can we talk to you about pulling a plan together, about what would you invest in?’.
“When they speak to central government, central government say ‘forget the North East, come to Cambridge, because that’s where the growth is going to be’. That’s the problem we’ve got.”
The mayor’s wider point at the launch of the think-tank – which focuses on the North East and Cumbria – is the need to change the Treasury’s mindset to equalise the decades-long lack of investment in the region.
I approached the Department for Business and Trade – which partly runs the OFI – on Friday lunchtime about Lord Houchen’s claims. They’ve so far not disputed his characterisation of the meeting last week.
But a spokesman said: “To say this Government doesn’t want investment in the North East is a nonsense. In just six months this Government has brought £20 billion of investment and 9,000 jobs to the region in everything from engineering to offshore wind.
“Our Plan for Change will ensure more investment and jobs flow into every region in this country including our world class industry in the North East.”
You can read the original article by Rob Parsons in the Northern Agenda Newsletter here.