Andrew Carter: If you want to defeat populism – don’t abandon growing the economic value of our cities | Conservative Home

Andrew Carter is Chief Executive of Centre for Cities.

There is cross-party consensus between the Conservatives and Labour around the need to boost the UK’s economy by unleashing the economic potential of big cities. The last thing they in should do, faced with a surge in support for political non-mainstream parties like Reform UK, is abandon this agenda.

The case for investing in big cities was hard-won by the Conservatives before being adopted by Labour in Government. It owes a great deal first to George Osborne and Greg Clark, and then Boris Johnson and his Levelling-Up Secretary Michael Gove, as Labour openly admits.

When Angela Rayner and Keir Starmer launched their local election campaign last year, they lauded Rishi Sunak’s predecessors’ flagship Levelling Up policy – and in doing so reproached Rishi Sunak for letting it fall by the wayside. They were right that the underperformance of the UK’s big cities has added to the conditions that help populist political non-mainstream parties like Reform UK succeed.

People in many parts of the country feel their areas have been economically left behind.

But as the Conservatives and now Labour understand, you can’t address the UK’s economic challenges and the discontent that is driving people away from the political mainstream without strong dynamic cities. As commuting patterns show, the UK’s ‘second cities’ outside of London do generate some prosperity for their surrounding places. Average incomes are higher in some surrounding places than in the city itself.

These are the places where the people who have high-paid jobs in the city centre live. But while some places do benefit from the prosperity created in their nearby big city, many places are not benefitting. Places with fewer commuters – and weaker economic links with the nearest big city – are locked out of the opportunities to earn those higher wages.

It is the places where the big city benefit is lower that tended to have higher vote shares for Reform UK at the last election. The pattern is repeated across the big cities in the Midlands and the North of England. Places with stronger ties to the nearest big city show fewer signs of economic discontent, at least at the ballot box.

In Altrincham and Sale West, to the south of Manchester city centre, 9.4 per cent of residents has a job in the city centre and just under 10 per cent of the vote went to Reform UK there in the 2024 general election. Compare that with Stalybridge and Hyde, where 6.1 per cent of residents work in the city centre and more than one in five voted for Reform UK last year.

Just under 15 per cent of residents of Leeds North West work in the city centre, and Reform polled at 12 per cent there in 2024. But in Wakefield and Rothwell, another constituency whose boundaries overlap with the Leeds metro area, the share of residents commuting to the city centre is around half, at 7.5 per cent, and Reform took one in five votes cast there last year.

The economic and political problem is that big cities aren’t generating enough prosperity to share across their whole regions. To address economic discontent in Stalybridge and Wakefield, we have to make Manchester and Leeds bigger and more dynamic wealth creators.

Boris Johnson and Michael Gove understood this. The Levelling Up White Paper in 2022 set out an ambitious vision for tackling the dual economic and political challenge of creating more wealth, boosting incomes and overcoming populism.

Big cities outside of London had a major role in this vision. It wanted to harness the scale and agglomeration benefits of these cities, backed up by plans to devolve more powers to the metro mayor which had been established by previous Conservative administrations.

It was based on sound economic analysis.

Unlike their G7 peers, the UK’s second cities have seen their economies held back by restrictive national policies – from the lack of devolved powers over skills, housing and transport, or the lack of an industrial strategy to help guide private investment, to a restrictive planning system that made development costly and slow.

Unlike international peers in countries like France and Germany, where ‘second cities’ bring national productivity up, the UK’s second cities act as a drag on the UK economy, bringing average economic output down. If the case for a city-focused approach to increasing national prosperity is not made and defended strongly enough, local areas will demand Westminster to do more for their area.

The result is that government succumbs to the urge for ‘jam-spreading’ – short-term interventions and thin allocation of scarce resources across lot and lots of places. With no strategic purpose or framework, these fail to help any place fulfil its potential. That, unfortunately, is what ultimately derailed the Levelling Up agenda.

Encouragingly, the new Labour Government has revived the idea of an economic strategy that encourages big cities like Manchester and Birmingham to play the role in the country that Lyon and Munich do in their countries

It has embarked on substantive planning reforms that will make it easier for cities to build more homes. It plans to continue the Conservatives’ efforts to deepen metro mayors’ powers, granting them powers to deliver new homes and public transport infrastructure together, enabling them to link people to the city centre where the highest-paid jobs tend to be located. And in June, it will unveil an industrial strategy which should give major cities a pivotal role in fostering the cutting edge of the economy.

All of this aims to strengthen cities to generate more prosperity for the people living in their outskirts and hinterlands. Had Boris Johnson and Michael Gove succeeded in doing what they set out in the Levelling Up White Paper, we would be much further down this path.

Politicians in Westminster would also have more to offer those voters who are increasingly turning away from the political mainstream and looking for populist solutions offered by parties like Reform UK. Populist non-mainstream politics thrives in places that are locked out of economic opportunity. The best solution to the rise of populism in and around big cities is to take what works for the most prosperous places, and spread this prosperity further to more of their neighbours.

The myth of “left-behind” places is that big cities are thriving economically and have benefitted from Government decision-making that has put smaller places at a disadvantage. Given the big cities actual underperformance, we need to see “left-behind” places in a different way. These “left behind” places will be poorly served if Conservative politicians abandon an economic agenda they helped to build and turn against plans to strengthen big cities.