Minister gives more power to the North for job creation

Jobs were on the agenda at last week’s Conference of the North [1 March 2024] as Levelling Up secretary Michael Gove made a series of announcements in Leeds.

Alongside West Yorkshire, South Yorkshire and the Liverpool City Region getting level four devolved powers, the Levelling Up minister also announced more jobs at BAE Submarines Systems.

Gove said the government would reinforce “support in Barrow, where the commitment that we have with British aerospace to build our next generation of nuclear submarines will generate thousands of new highly skilled high-paying jobs for decades to come”.

The minister added that the jobs need “new housing”, “improved transport links” and “even better educational systems” to go alongside them.

On West Yorkshire, he said that health tech plans had been agreed and an extra investment of £50m was pinpointed to accelerate growth in Leeds, Bradford and Huddersfield.

“And a further £25m we find will be used to give local people the skills that they need to work on more than 7,000 high-quality jobs in the region from the investment,” added Gove.

The conference at the Royal Armouries in Leeds was also attended by the shadow Levelling Up secretary Angela Rayner, and she detailed how if Labour was successful in the forthcoming election, the party would “abolish zero hours, boost conditions around social care and the Fair Pay Agreement”.

Green policies and net zero were also on the agenda, with the Labour minister saying that the “green prosperity plan” would deliver industrial decarbonisation in Merseyside, Teesside and the Humber.

That would come with investment in the North-West, protecting the “clean” steel jobs in in Sheffield, Scunthorpe and Rotherham, and lead to more than 130,000 new jobs in the North, according to Rayner.

Mayor of Greater Manchester (GM) Andy Burnham was also in attendance, speaking on a panel entitled ‘Empowering the North’ alongside Tracy Brabin, mayor of West Yorkshire, Steve Rotheram, mayor of Liverpool City Region, Oliver Coppard, mayor of South Yorkshire and Jamie Driscoll, mayor of North of Tyne.

Fresh from opening a brand-new Green Skills Hub at Stockport College, Burnham made a controversial call on the need for universities to build the people of tomorrow.

The Stockport hub is aimed to tackle the UK’s green skills gap – which needs more than 200,000 people training for green energy roles by 2050, according to PwC research – and the Green Alliance, an independent think tank and charity also estimates that around 300,000 more skilled workers are required in the green sector.

“The obsession with the university route, which has basically dominated English education for all of our lifetime, has been particularly detrimental to the North of England,” opined Burnham.

“[After university] I wanted to stay in Manchester but could not find anything and like everyone on this panel to get on in life, I had to go South. That was our reality in the North of England if you grew up here in the 80s and the 90s. 

“Today that is completely different, there are jobs in Greater Manchester that are graduate jobs and other jobs; and it doesn’t mean your career is suffering if you stay in the North – you have exactly the same opportunities.” 

The GM mayor said that “the next bit” is to talk “messages of hope and that we can all be what we want to”.

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