Fairer deal for North at last?

Minister hints at funding change

THE NORTH is – potentially – one step closer to transformative economic renewal if Exchequer Secretary Kemi Badenoch now proves to be good as her word. A protégé of Chancellor Rishi Sunak, she gave the clearest indication yet that the Treasury’s Green Book on infrastructure investment will be rewritten in this month’s Spending Review to end decades of damaging funding inequality.

This is the mechanism that has seen Yorkshire

– and the North – shortchanged because the formula was skewered so heavily in favour of the more densely populated London and the South East. And she was very pointed when Nick Fletcher, a newly- elected ‘ Blue Wall’ Tory MP for the Don Valley, described current arrangements as a scandal in a backbench debate led by Sheffield City Region mayor Dan Jarvis. “I can tell him we are planning to conclude the review and publish the updated Green Book at Spending Review,” said Ms Badenoch while stressing that the Chancellor, as Richmond MP, is on the North’s side.

Arguably the most important decision if the Northern Powerhouse is to be turbo- charged, it was helpful that it fell to a Treasury Minister to respond for the Government. She was left in no doubt that the North have very good economic and political reasons to feel neglected despite some of her lame protestations to the contrary.

This is why The Yorkshire Post has, yet again, been driving forward last year’s agenda- setting and awardwinning Power Up The North campaign which became a precursor to the levelling up agenda – past spending imbalances on housing for example have been as great as 80 per cent.

But similar promises before have not come to pass and Ms Badenoch will not be surprised to learn that the 15 million people working and living in the North will want to study the small- print of the review before giving their verdict.