Parties can let cities find the path to economic recovery
Author: Alexandra JonesDate: 05/10/2010
Publication: Yorkshire Post
Does the Labour party need to reconnect with cities across the UK? At first glance, this might sound a surprising question. In the General Election, the party maintained its northern industrial roots. While Labour shed urban voters at the national poll, it is still better represented than the other parties in cities. And in the local elections, the party won back some major cities – including Leeds itself, now a minority administration with the Greens.
Outside Yorkshire, Labour enjoyed other high profile successes – reclaiming Liverpool from the Liberal Democrats and Coventry from the Conservatives, for example.
But Labour also lost Parliamentary seats across cities in the South, including Brighton, Bristol, Reading and Portsmouth. And post-election analysis from the Centre for Cities has shown that while Labour ended up with three-quarters (77 per cent) of Parliamentary seats in London and the six largest cities outside the capital (including Leeds and Sheffield, as well as Manchester, Liverpool, Newcastle and Birmingham), the party received less than half of the vote (42 per cent). If the alternative vote is brought in next May, Labour would be less certain of retaining as many seats, suggesting that complacency about Labour's urban vote would be unwise.
So how can Labour reconnect with the cities?
Our pre-election polling showed that the economy was the top concern among urban voters – over and above crime, immigration and defence.
This suggests that there is political ground for the taking for any party able to reconnect with urban voters on the economy. There is a real opportunity to place a story about future jobs growth within an urban context because cities are where future jobs growth is most likely to happen.
England's cities are its economic powerhouses. In 2008, 62 per cent of jobs in England were located in our 56 largest cities – and two thirds of these jobs were based in London and England's four largest city-regions of Leeds, Manchester, Birmingham and Liverpool.
Even more crucially for recovery in the years ahead, cities are the places where jobs growth is most likely to happen at a time of public spending cuts – 75 per cent of England's private sector workforce is based in its cities.
We'd like to see all three parties focus on how they can support cities like Leeds and York to drive the economic recovery. This means generating some practical ideas about how to support private sector job creation in cities such as Leeds which, in a recent report, we identified as a city with private sector growth potential (between 1998 and 2008, the city generated over 25,000 private sector posts).
