ANDREW VINE:

GOVERNMENT STRUGGLING TO SET DECISIVE COURSE ON VIRUS

WE CELEBRATED Yorkshire Day this year amid some of the most difficult times we have faced in living memory.

Like the rest of the region, my own area of South Yorkshire has been hard hit by Covid – both the disease itself and its economic consequences.

But one thing the crisis has made clear is that you can’t tackle those challenges from a desk in Whitehall.

There is no better day to get the message across: if there is one thing the Government could do to help us weather this storm, it is to follow through on their rhetoric about devolution, and give us the tools to control the pandemic, and then to build back better.

As Mayor of the Sheffield City region, I believe government should involve partnerships from the most local parish council right up to the national level. But the current crisis has made the dangers of over-centralisation clearer than ever.

In our efforts against Covid, local knowledge counts. Our councils and Directors of Public Health know their areas in a fine-grained detail that you just can’t replicate from a Ministry in London.

They can connect a few cases in a particular postcode with a sheltered accommodation block whose residents need protecting. They can build a detailed picture of how sufferers from different areas might be connected by a single employer.

And they have the contacts with local community groups and agencies to mount a better coordinated and more grassroots response when hotspots emerge.

If our future is one of localised outbreaks and lockdowns, local knowledge and freedom to act is more important than ever to make sure that we can nip any resurgence in the bud as quickly as possible, but also so that we don’t unnecessarily damage the local economy.

But, until very recently, local governments did not have access to the powers and the real-time data we needed to do that job as effectively as possible. After a lot of pushing, the Government has finally announced that will change, but it should not have taken so long.

What we need is not just action on this issue, but a change in culture in Whitehall so that a collaborative approach is simply routine.

That applies to other areas as well – and especially to the effort to rebuild from Covid. Failing to bring our local knowledge, networks and legitimacy to bear would inexcusably weaken our recovery from one of the greatest shocks in our history.

We have a plan in place. Developed in consultation with local councils, businesses, key institutions like our universities, and other partners, it sets out a roadmap not just to recover from the pandemic, but for a renewal that builds a stronger, greener, fairer South Yorkshire for us all.

The plan calls for £1.7bn of investment in apprenticeships, skills and other help for people to get work, support for businesses, and hundreds of millions of pounds of new infrastructure spending to decarbonise our economy, create jobs, and finally narrow the gap between the North and the rest of the country.

That plan represents a down-payment on the wider change we need to see – a genuine New Deal for the North. We need to fix our decrepit railways and other infrastructure.

We need to help companies to innovate, and to commercialise that innovation – for example by building an ‘MIT for the North’ based on our wordclass Advanced Manufacturing Research Centre. We need to tackle the lack of skills which wastes so much of our potential.

There is no better time for this than now. We will certainly need more public spending to support the economy amid the post-Covid recession. But we have to make sure this historic investment produces a real and lasting legacy.

In a Britain that is more divided than ever, anything which can increase confidence in our democracy and give people a sense of taking back control is invaluable. Indeed, without it, there is a terribly real danger the United Kingdom may not survive.

The Government is releasing a new White Paper on devolution in September. Now is its chance to give a bold reality to their fine words, and put in place a deep and systematic process of national dialogue and reform.

There are few things more important as we struggle to contain Covid, rescue our economy and build a better Britain.