UNDERSTANDING ENGLAND AS IT IS INSPIRING ENGLAND AS IT COULD BE WHAT IS THE FUTURE OF THE ENGLISH WORKING CLASS?

A report on the impact of automation on English Working Class Jobs

Future of Work: Speech to Chatham House – Liam Byrne MP

Places and Prosperity – Lucy Powell MP INTRODUCTION

Fifty five years ago, the historian EP Thompson published the ground breaking History of the English Working Class. But what's its future?

Policy-makers agree that automation is coming fast - and think technology will have a bigger impact on wages than tradei.

New jobs will be created – but lots of existing jobs will be lost. And overwhemingly, its the working class which will get hit hardest - with huge implications for the future of inequality.

On current trends, the top 1% is set to control an extraordinary 2/3 of global wealth by 2030 – up from 50% todayii.

The rise of the robots may make this problem worse.

1. Red Shift analysis shows that five times more working class jobs may be lost through automation than the shutdown of the coal and steel industry put together during the 1980’s: between 2.1 million and 2.9 million working class jobs - overwhelmingly in retail, transportation and routine manufacturing.

2 2. House of Commons library analysis of OECD figures shows 1,024,000 jobs will be lost amongst amongst the poorest 10% of UK workers (under £7.64/ hour) - that’s 32% of all low pay jobs

3. Amongst the bottom 25% of the jobs market, (under £9/ hour), 2,128,000 jobs are at high risk of automation - that’s about a quarter of low paid jobs. By contrast almost no jobs are forecast to be lost amongst higher income groups.

4. Tory seats in England will be hit harder than Labour seats: meaning there is therefore a political prize to be won for Labour if it can offer a better way of dealing with automation than the Tories. • 4.08 million jobs may be lost in English Tory seats (around 30.7% of jobs in every seat) compared to • 3.45 million jobs may be lost in English Labour seats (around 30.3% of jobs in every seat) • That’s an average of over 14,000 jobs in every constituency

5. Exclusive opinion polling by Opinium shows that people are worried and want government to do more • Almost 7-in-10 (69%) say the government should provide money for re-training if someone loses their job due to automation. • A quarter (27%) of Brits think the government is doing too little in response to automation in the workplace - although this rises to 35% in the North West and 29% in the South East. • Half think that increasing automation in the workplace will make it harder for them to earn a decent wage, or find a new job in the future and working class voters are more likely to say that automation will make it harder to earn a decent wage in the future (54% of C2DE vs 46% of ABC1). • Increasing automation will make it harder to... o Earn a decent wage (49%) o Find a new job in the future (47%) o Reach their earning potential (46%) o To change job roles (41%)

• A third of workers think it is likely that human jobs or tasks will be replaced by automation in the next 10 years - but this rises to nearly half in the North East and West Midlands

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Question: How likely do you think it is that automation will replace jobs or tasks that were previously performed largely or wholly by a human being in your job or profession over the next 10 years?

% saying ‘likely’ or ‘very likely’

North East 48 % West Midlands 46 %

London 41 %

South East 36 %

South West 35 %

Yorkshire and 31 % Humberside

North West 30 %

East of England 24 %

East Midlands 19 %

Liam Byrne MP, who prepared the report said:

“The governments of the eighties made terrible mistakes when they let industrial change destroy jobs and communities. Yet we’re now on course to make the same mistakes again and once more, it’s the English working class which is at the sharp end.

“Five times more jobs be lost due to the rise of the robots, than were lost by the demise of coal and steel, and most people think it's going to be harder to earn a decent wage or get a better job.

“Workers are clear: they want Government to help them retrain for a better future. So it’s time we came up with a proper plan to help us earn a way to a better life in the years to come.

““We are at a fork in the road. Unless we take dramatic steps now to help people adapt to changing technology, it’ll be impossible to reverse massive trends in rising inequality for the rest of the 21st century."

4 Opinium senior researcher Jack Tadman said:

“With 3-in-10 (29%) saying they don’t know which professions are likely to be impacted by automation, public awareness and understanding of how automation will impact society is low.

“This presents an opportunity for both government and businesses to promote the potential benefits of automation, with younger workers perhaps the best place to start: workers aged 18-34 were the only age group to feel more positive than negative about the impact of automation on their job/profession (29% vs. 24% respectively).

“Therefore, it perhaps isn’t surprising that half of the UK think that the government should help people to learn new skills in response to automation in the workplace, and almost 4-in-10 say the government should be educating people about the opportunities it presents.”

5 DATA TABLES

Jobs at likely to be automatable across current income distribution

Jobs likely to be automatable by 2030 in the UK Income 0-10% 10-25% 25-50% 50- 75- 90- distribution (under £7.64 (£7.64 and £8.97 (£8.97-£12.49 75% 90% 100% (percentiles) an hour) an hour) an hour) UK jobs at risk 32% 23% 16% 5% 0% 0% Millions of 3.2 4.8 8 workers Estimated lost 1.024 1.104 1.28 3.408 jobs (million) OECD estimates with ONS income data: The Risk of Automation for Jobs in OECD Countries, Arntz et al 2016

Jobs at risk through automation across English constituencies

Jobs at high risk of automation by 2030 Across English parliamentary constituencies

Average no. jobs at Proportion of jobs at Total jobs at high risk risk risk Conservative Constituencies 14,014 30.7% 4,077,960 Labour Constituencies 15,142 30.3% 3,452,451 All English Constituencies 14,435 30.5% 7,766,225 The Impact of AI in UK Constituencies, October 2017, Future Advocacy

6 SELECTED WORKING CLASS JOB CURRENT FORECAST LEVEL POTENTIAL JOB CATEGORIES AT HIGH RISK OF NUMBER OF OF AUTOMATION LOSS AUTOMATION WORKERS

813 ASSEMBLERS AND ROUTINE 266, 000 90% 240,000 OPERATIVES

821 ROAD TRANSPORT DRIVERS 945,000 80% 756,000

822 MOBILE MACHINE DRIVERS AND 168,000 80% 134,000 OPERATIVES

926 ELEMENTARY STORAGE 416,000 80% 333,000 OCCUPATIONS

921 ELEMENTARY ADMINISTRATION 198,000 90% 99,000 OCCUPATIONS

711 SALES ASSISTANTS AND RETAIL 1,457,000 63% 918,000 CASHIERS

721 CUSTOMER SERVICE OCCUPATIONS 472,000 63% 297,000

722 CUSTOMER SERVICE MANAGERS 154,000 63% 97,000 AND SUPERVISORS

925 ELEMENTARY SALES OCCUPATIONS 130,000 63% 82,000

TOTAL JOBS LOST THROUGH 4,076,000 2,956,000 AUTOMATION

1971 COAL INDUSTRY JOBS 290,000

1971 STEEL INDUSTRY JOBS 325,000

TOTAL 615,000

AUTOMATION JOB LOSS AS 4.8 X PROPORTION OF COAL + STEEL

Overall job numbers from Labour Force Survey; Automation estimates for categories, 813, 821, 822, 711, 721, 722, 925 are from Carl Frey, Technology At Work, V3.0 Automating eCommerce (CitiGPS/Oxford Martin School, August 2017); Automation estimates for categories for 813 and 921 from Carl Frey, The Future of Employment (Osborne & Frey, Oxford Martin School, 2013)

7 NOTES TO EDITORS

1. The research was presented by Red Shift to a special event in the House of Commons chaired by Shabana Mahmood, and bringing together:

• Dr Carl Frey, University of Oxford, Co-Director of the Oxford Martin Programme on Technology and Employment

• Prof Rob Ford, University of Manchester, author of Revolt on the Right

• Prof Mike Savage, London School of Economics, author of Identities and Social Change in Britain since 1940

• Lucy Powell MP, Co-Chair of Red Shift

• Red Shift: The Future of the English Working Class, Wednesday 6th June 2018, 6.30PM, Wilson Room, House of Commons. 2. About Red Shift. Red Shift brings together a group of English Labour MP’s and activists determined to shine a spotlight on how England is changing, how peoples’ ambitions are changing – and how Labour needs to change to win. www.redshiftlabour.co.uk

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FUTURE OF WORK Remarks to Chatham House

Thursday 24th May, 2018 RT HON LIAM BYRNE MP

9 Introduction Thank you very much for inviting me to speak today – congratulations to Chatham House for hosting this important conference today - and to the Institute for the Future of Work, which launches today.

The doorstep is generally where we pick up on the public’s sixth sense about what’s really going on in the world and for me it’s been striking that in the last two elections I’ve had conversations with voters about their worries about the future.

One was in the printing industry. Another was a lorry driver. They were both in their fifties. They knew they had decades of work ahead. They hadn’t saved enough in their pensions. And they could see their jobs in peril as technology was changing. They’d both paid in all their life their worry was blunt: “how am I going to survive, how am I am going to support my family when I’m on the scrap heap?”

This fear of the future, this sense of foreboding, is having a profound impact on politics and the decisions people take on polling day. In particular it’s creating a geography of discontent – where self-confident cities vote one way, and anxious towns, which still hold the balance of power, vote another.

So today I want spell out three blunt messages about the future of work and the task of reformers ahead.

MORE NOT LESS

First, the truth is that if we want a richer, fairer country, then the possibilities of technology should not be feared or frustrated - but accelerated.

As someone once put it, our problem is not too many robots, it’s too few.

In the long term, the key to a country’s wealth is its productivity and right now ours is terrible.

Indeed, it worse than at the end of the 1970’s when we used to call it ‘British disease’.

10 “

Over the last three centuries, the way we’ve escaped the Malthus trap, is by harnessing technology to transform the business of producing more with less.

The IMF put it like this recently,

“While the time lags between particular inventions and their eventual broad diffusion can be, long and change over time, technology has

11 been key to productivity growth since the first industrial revolution, which, in turn, has underpinned strong per- capita GDP growth”.

So, our first challenge is that the nation that led the first industrial revolution is also ran in the fourth.

Once we were the superpower of the steam age. Now we’re a cyber slow coach.

While counties like Israel, South Korea, Singapore, Estonia, UAE are racing to put in place the infrastructure of the future - 5G networks, public e-identity schemes, ubiquitous ePayment technology – and we are lagging behind.

China, the world’s first user of paper currency is on course to become the worlds first cashless society. As one Far Eastern ambassador said to me the other day, we used to look West for the most advanced ideas; now we look east.

We spend too little on R&D; we propose too little for digital infrastructure; and our electronic ID schemes for the online world are too poor. This has to change.

12 OECD NATIONS: % of GDP spent on R&D

FAIR SHARES

But, second, if we are to create new wealth, our task is to ensure that it is wealth that is fairly shared.

And, if we want this new world to be a fairer place, then we need to restore a moral economy where today the market economy dominates.

This conflict, as EP Thompson recognised, goes back to the very beginnings of the industrial revolution, when in his words, the medieval moral economy of just price, and just wage, broke down as the market economy broke through.

There was protest - often violence – aimed at the machines.

From the arson at Albion Mill in 1791, to the Luddite machine-breakers of 1811-13, to the Captain Swing riots of 1830.

We think this was anti-technology. But it was not. The millers of London and the spinners of the North simply wanted decent plans to

13 help them maintain themselves a decent life amidst change. Just prices. And just pay.

Eric Hobsbawn called it, ’collective bargaining by riot’; there was no question to hostility to machines as such, he noted, rather,

‘Wrecking was simply a technique of trade unionism in the period before, and during, the early phases, of the Industrial Revolution’1.

Without a plan to recreate a semblance of the moral economy, I can tell you technophobia is going to become a national religion.

Why? Because we can’t divorce technology from the profound rise of market power amongst capitalism’s winner take all firms that are already driving up prices and driving down wages.

Let me explain.

When we think about the future of work, we need to keep both tech and trade in view – because both have enabled the most important economic change of the age of globalisation: the huge growth in market power of global, platform businesses.

At the end of the 90s, progressives helped take a series of steps - creating NAFTA, admitting China to the WTO, and East Europe in the EUROPEAN Union which created a new vast global market place linking 6 billion of the worlds 7 billion people. In this market a $20 trillion merger wave created a generation of companies bigger than countries.

Today, they dominate the commanding heights of the global economy. The collapsing cost of technology allowed them to build global supply chains which meant they can offshore or automate labour costs to drive down costs..

So they are assumed unprecedented market power - including the power to hold down wages - and mark-up prices2. They are the new

1 EJ Hobsbawn, The Machine Breakers, Past and Present (Feb, 1952)

2 http://www.janeeckhout.com/wp-content/uploads/RMP.pdf

14 monopsonists3 and oligarchs. And this largely explains why wage share of national income is falling.

As it happens, this is exactly what Joseph Schumpeter forecast would happen.

His book Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy was published In England 75 years ago.

Everyone remembers the famous phrase 'creative destruction '.

But everyone's forgets the flipside Schumpeter forecast: the destruction of competition.

That is what we're watching today.

3 https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/sites/default/files/page/files/20161025_monopsony_labor_mrkt _cea.pdf

15 More than three-fourths of U.S. industries have experienced an increase in concentration levels over the last two decades4. Markups in prices are up two thirds since the early 80’s5. Wages are stagnant if not down. But profits are breaking records. As is the stock market.

Now, the evidence shows that these super giants – or superstar firms - aren’t simply using M&A to build power – but technology.6 And so we have the advent of what economists call frontier firms, which are far more productive than anyone else, and far more profitable.

These new elites have unprecedented power to behave badly: hurting old ethical goals of just price, just pay and just shares of power.

Think of James Bloodworth’s horror stories about the life in an Amazon warehouse, where ubiquitous monitors have become the new ‘butty man’ deciding who gets paid what at the end of the week – and gets the extra hours7.

Or the death of DPD driver Don Lane, who worked himself to death in fear of the firm’s penalties for slowness.

4 See https://economics.mit.edu/files/12544 5 http://www.nber.org/papers/w23687 6 https://hbr.org/2017/04/do-most-companies-even-try-to-innovate-anymore 7 A phrase I owe to my friend, Clive Efford MP

16 Or Deliveroo’s court-won freedom not to pay the minimum wage or holiday pay.

So, new public goods and new regulations - especially in the gig economy - will be needed to restore the balance, and resolve what I call the ‘Bridges challenge’.

Harry Bridges was president of the ILWU from 1937 until 1977. An Australian, he became a longshoreman in San Francisco and won the loyalty of maritime workers after leading them through the bloody labor strike of 1934.

In the 1960s, the invention of containers put Bridges's leadership to the test.

He saw that mechanization was inevitable, but that it could also make longshore work safer and easier.

While some jobs would be lost, Bridges wanted to make the best deal possible for longshoremen, to get them "a piece of the machine."

As he put it:

"We should accept mechanization and start making it work for us, not against us."

So that’s the challenge for labour today. How do we make sure the machine is working for workers -not against them. Helping create work which safer, more fulfilling, and better paid. Creating a country not just of full employment. But fulfilling employment.

17 The key to this will be be a progressive supply side strategy: economic growth driven not by the boasting supply of capital – but by boosting the supply of innovation.

That’s why strategies to boost human capital strategies are crucial – in particular, as the IMF advises, boosting investment in skills training for low skill workers. As the country grows richer, we need to be spending more on tertiary and technical education. At the bottom, we are the bottom of the pack.

The UK spends about 0.5% of GDP on tertiary education – that’s about a third of what digital leaders like Estonia spend.

But this is not just about, money is about a new institutional settlement.

In the 1960’s the Wilson government delivered the extraordinary Robbins report which transformed the world of HE.

18 Today, we need Robbins Rebooted8, with the aim of transforming lifelong learning. To create what the French call a 'Learning society' where your school, college or university has a lifelong relationship with you - that is rather more than sending pleading fundraising email.

Realistically, this has huge implications for our learning institutions which by and large wave goodbye to you at 21.

If what you learn on a three year degree becomes quickly dated after the moment you leave, then one has to ask why are we offering three year degrees. Why not ten year degrees - offered a year at a time every decade of your life?

This will need seismic shifts in FE, and HE funding models along with the role of national insurance and almost certainly the sort of Perhaps even the lifelong savings accounts now being tested in Singapore.

But the second half of progressive supply side economics, is not deregulation, but re-regulation to create the incentives for firms to share fairly with workers and take an interest in raising their skills levels.

This will need tougher competition policy to breakup new monopolies, proper regulation of monopsony, new minimum wage rules, stronger collective bargaining and corporate governance reform to make sure new skills earn the pay they should.

When William Beveridge was describing his five giants of on the road to post war reconstruction, he called out ‘idleness’ and wrote, ‘next to the maintenance of peace, maintenance of productive employment is the most important of all reconstruction aims’; ‘productive work’ was key to the abolition of want.

Today, the key to productive work that helps abolish want is not an end to idleness- it’s an end to exploitation.

8 http://www.smf.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/Social-Market-Foundation3822-SMF- Robbins-Rebooted_web1.pdf

19 MANAGING OUR SHIFT TO THE FUTURE

Third, we need to prepare to step in in with extra help the sectors and spaces hit hard and hit first.

The headline numbers on job automation are alarming – with 10% of UK jobs, at risk of significant change.

But it’s the story beneath the averages that should worry us.

The averages disguise the reality of what will happen. Some places and some sectors will be hit much, much harder, much much sooner.

Millions of jobs for instance may go from retail over the years ahead, and transportation. Those happen to be the sectors employing the majority of the British working class. So the risk is that we lose more working class jobs than the during the shutdown of coal, steel and shipbuilding -combined.

20 Now, traditionally we've done a very poor job at helping manage the consequences of what's called sunset industries. Yet we know the answer. It was set out in the 1944 White Paper on Full Employment.

This is exactly what we didn't do during the 80's, when coal, steel, shipbuilding and manufacturing were shutdown. With terrible consequences for poverty which then rolled down the generations.

Today, huge numbers of people in the former coalfields and steel towns live on long term disability benefits. We never found a way of regenerating successfully.

Overwhelming that was because we spent money in those places on physical capital not human capital.

I remember ten years ago, in one of my wards, one of the poorest working class wards in Britain, it was easier to get money for bollards than ESOL classes.

This is not a mistake we should repeat.

So we need to start identifying areas at risk today, and begin plans for a huge skills surge to insure against the future.

CONCLUSION

Final point. None of these ideas are possible without a different fiscal stance.

First, a readiness to tax corporate profit in new ways; that's partly about raising the corporate taxes because today's tax cuts are which are currently being hoarded, paid out to shareholders in share buybacks, or sliced to flatter senior pay. Often all three.

21 But it's also about transforming global cooperation so we bring transparency to tax havens and introduce registers of beneficial ownership.

Second, we have to recognise use that old divisions between capital and revenue spending are hard to sustain.

Generally fiscal rules smile on borrowing to invest in infrastructure because the payback is long term.

But today it's intellectual capital not physical capital that often gives you the biggest bang for your buck.

When I was finishing my own economic history of Britain, told through the lives of our entrepreneurs, the thing that struck me most was the way entrepreneurs make history by inventing the future.

That’s a tradition that we desperately need to rekindle.

But if we want that future to be fails shared, then we’ll need to be true to the very best of our radical traditions.

Ends.

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PLACES AND PROSPERITY Addressing Britain’s regional inequalities

Tuesday 8th May, 2018 LUCY POWELL MP

23 The buzz phrase of the recent past was that with the advent of the internet age, the world would become flat, and riches and success would follow anywhere which was connected to the World Wide Web. However, this vision of a flatter future has not come to pass. Indeed, the world is becoming more and more spiky, to coin the alternative phrase, than ever.

Just as in the industrial revolution, when people migrated from countryside to the new towns and cities seeking employment and prosperity in the engines of industrial growth, the jobs of the knowledge, digital, and creative economy of the future are also being driven by cities, where a critical mass of knowledge and ideas mesh with know-how and well-serviced communities. In Britain, this has exacerbated regional inequalities as London grows ever stronger, boosting the prosperity of the South and East of England at a much faster rate than elsewhere9.

This presents further profound challenges for rural communities and towns, which, especially in the North of England, are very poorly connected, and have yet to reinvent themselves following deindustrialisation and post-mining decline. This has long been a problem for successive governments and policy-makers and, in post- Brexit Britain, the politics of ‘towns’ is growing in prominence, with excellent initiatives like the new Centre for Towns think tank.

However, the history of regional inequality in Britain lies with the growth of just one global ‘spike’, and the current gulf between North and South will continue to widen without a real strategy to address this. It would be a massive mistake to think that our other cities will automatically thrive in the future. Moreover, towns in the South are, in many cases, undergoing a renaissance. From Margate to Hastings, their proximity and connectivity to London is enabling them to reimagine their futures afresh.

9 https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/apr/28/uk-economy-london--south-east--tuc https://www.theguardian.com/business/2017/may/23/uk-budget-deficit-grows-to-more- than-10bn-as-people-spend-less

24 To end regional inequality we must develop at least one more global- sized ‘spike’, preferably in the North of England. Compared with other countries, our cities – apart from London of course – fare badly, with none appearing in the top 128 in the Global Cities Outlook 2016-1710. In contrast, Germany has four cities on this index, Canada three, Italy, Spain, and Australia each have two, and China now totally dominates with more than 1911.

By any independent analysis of the data and assets, there is only one ‘mini-spike’ that has the potential to compete on this stage – which centres around Greater Manchester, but with the right strategy would stretch from Liverpool to Leeds, and beyond. This should not be controversial, and is not a new thought. In fact, this thinking grew throughout the 2000s, leading to the Northern Powerhouse project.

This is not about putting all our eggs in one basket, and certainly as a nation we should have the ambition to identify and plan the growth of other spikes accordingly – including around Birmingham in the Midlands, Bristol in the Southwest, and elsewhere. Nor is it a zero-sum game. But without a clear national drive to create a global ‘Northern Powerhouse’, there runs the constant risk of delayed plans, compromise, watered down proposals, and parochial politics making the same mistakes of the past – leading to many small-scale plans which together amount to little. This has been the hallmark of much regional policy over recent years.

Investment in infrastructure, science, and transport are all overly- focused on London and the South East. As IPPR North – a think tank – have recently revealed, the North receives £2,555 less per person than London in transport investment12. Whilst London is pushing ahead

10 https://www.atkearney.com/documents/10192/12610750/Global+Cities+2017+- +Leaders+in+a+World+of+Disruptive+Innovation.pdf/c00b71dd-18ab-4d6b-8ae6- 526e380d6cc4 11 https://www.atkearney.com/documents/10192/12610750/Global+Cities+2017+- +Leaders+in+a+World+of+Disruptive+Innovation.pdf/c00b71dd-18ab-4d6b-8ae6- 526e380d6cc4 12 https://www.ippr.org/news-and-media/press-releases/new-transport-figures-reveal-north- to-receive-indefensible-2-555-less-per-person-than-london

25 with Crossrail Two, rail to connect the great cities and towns of the North is not even off the drawing board.

The devolution agenda, however, is one of the exceptions. The creation of strong Combined Authorities, metro mayors, and bodies like Transport for the North, together with real powers over resources and decisions, are a good start. Devolving further powers, and devolving these powers further down, will not only help in the rebalancing of the country, but will be absolutely critical to creating the sort of good, inclusive growth the North so desperately needs. We do not want to, nor need to, recreate some of the worst aspects of London: deep- seated inequalities, especially in housing with overheated house prices for homeowners; and a chronic shortage of social and affordable options for everyone else; and, despite improvements in education, entrenched lack of social mobility.

So this agenda is not just about boosting Manchester as a regional centre, or already affluent areas such as Cheshire. It is about ensuring every person has the chance to access the skills, networks, and opportunities that a second global city should bring. Travel to work time, access to high skilled and well-paid jobs, and secure and affordable housing are all vital. Take my own constituency – Manchester Central – which the names suggests should be at the heart of benefiting from the Northern Powerhouse. Yet far from it. Manchester Central has been in the top ten constituencies with the highest number of children living in poverty in Britain for years13, and many places within it – like Moston, Newton Heath and Clayton – feel much more like the forgotten towns of much of the rest of the city region.

So we need the big vision and the big bucks, for things like transport and infrastructure, alongside a radical agenda of the redistribution of

13 https://www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk/news/greater-manchester-news/manchester- central-highest-percentage-children-1331538 http://www.endchildpoverty.org.uk/new- figures-reveal-nearly-half-of-children-are-living-in-poverty-in-some-parts-of-the-uk/ http://www.endchildpoverty.org.uk/poverty-in-your-area-2018/

26 power and priorities so we can create communities and places which are fully included in the prosperity that should follow.

Take, for example, investing in our people for the economy of the future. Childhood development and the school readiness gap between poorer children and their peers are larger in the North than London14; school results, access to skills training, and skills spending are all better in the South than the North, and levels of adult literacy and numeracy lower15. Yet the devolution agenda has had little to do with education, skills, and the early years thus far. This is madness when local economic plans are only as good as the people to fill the jobs.

I am delighted to be leading Andy Burnham’s – the Mayor of Greater Manchester – ambitious agenda to tackle school readiness in Greater Manchester. But I could achieve much more if schools were required to be at the table, rather than in a voluntary capacity as it is now.

Regional inequality lies in power inequalities, too, with the vast majority of decisions affecting local areas still made in Whitehall rather than town halls.

So, to truly tackle regional inequalities, we need to ditch the buzzwords, and develop, implement, and sustain a real package of devolution of power and funding into the hands of local leaders who must rise above parochial politics. Britain needs a truly global second super city in the North, but critically one whose growth is fundamentally based on inclusive growth, reaching all parts, not relying on trickle-down, which has only increased inequalities elsewhere16.

Ends.

i https://blogs.imf.org/2018/05/01/technology-and-the-future-of- work/?utm_medium=email&utm_source=govdelivery ii https://www.inclusivegrowth.co.uk/oecd-press-release/

14 https://www.ippr.org/publications/northern-schools-putting-education-at-the-heart-of-the- northern-powerhouse and analysis from the House of Commons Library on latest Early Years Foundation stage profile figures. 15 http://www.northernpowerhousepartnership.co.uk/media/1208/npp-educating-the- north.pdf 16 https://www.equalitytrust.org.uk/scale-economic-inequality-uk

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