Rebalancing the economy of the UK has become the new orthodoxy among all political parties. Rebalancing back towards more manufacturing, certainly.
But also rebalancing geographically, in terms of policies towards growth in the regions and city-regions; less dependence of the UK economy on growth in the South East – supercharging UK growth by re-awakening the great regional economies.
What has yet to emerge, however, is an acceptance that this geographical rebalancing can also apply at regional and, in particular, city level.
Just as the UK economy has been held back over the last 20 years due to the failure to invest in developing regional economies and a reliance on London, so I believe the Birmingham economy has been held back over the last 20 years due to over-reliance on developing its city centre.
It needs to be the main focus of economic development over the next 10 years in this city to rebalance Birmingham’s economy. As nationally, it needs to be rebalanced away from commerce and finance and back towards a greater share coming from productive and sustainable manufacturing and new industries.
But the real challenge and an immediate focus is actually rebalancing growth across the entire city. That means a 40-ward economic growth strategy, not a one ward strategy.
Too much of the way we think about this city is psychologically, politically and economically about the bull’s eye – the square mile at B1.
A still stalling and completely misguided enterprise zone was intended also to expand and widen the bull’s eye.
While a city centre can be a place where Brummies can live and meet and play, there is nothing to say it needs to be where most of them work, where all business is done.
Some business, some commerce, relies on cheek-by-jowl proximity in a defined place across a range of different but complementary activities: bankers, accountants, lawyers, ICT and support services.
But the city needs to breathe deeper in terms of economic activity. The shallow breaths of city centre economic dominance are holding Birmingham back.
The million Brummies we have cannot all turn to the centre of the city. It will be self-defeating.
The population growth that will require housing and jobs will strangle the city if we all continue to pile into its centre. If the body of those who work in Birmingham, but who live outside it, also continues to grow then we will literally grind to a halt.
Future population growth needs to see work nearer to the new homes we have to build simply to accommodate the sheer numbers of people.
Consequently the city will need to become one where we grow a large number of vibrant satellite areas of industry and business activity.
The perceived need to regenerate a city’s geographical centre has also involved patterns of economic activity which fit a model: mainly commerce and finance.
This has led to over-reliance on building more towers in the sky for commerce. Office building has been the real growth area in Birmingham over the last few years – and it is not the option we should be pursuing.
Policies and investment patterns nudging an alternative spread of economic activity and new, smaller hubs of inter-related growth should these days be in Digbeth-style vibrant points of new growth.
Focus around new industries in different and geographically balanced areas across a city can often develop what economists now call ‘serendipitous spillover’ growth around it of the productive, creative and commercial next to one another.
Birmingham cannot be left behind in one of the most important areas of future industry – 3D printing. But it is a model ideally suited to being placed across the city in small units in widespread pockets of activity and serendipitous growth.
Instead, the effect of economic policy and planning in the city over the last 20 years has been that activity in the wider city has become displaced to the centre of the city, further concentrating people and spending and support services in a flight to the centre.
The transport problems this city has would start to be relieved by literally changing the direction of travel.
Planning to move people to different satellite parts of the city to work. At the moment getting from the outskirts of the city to its centre is such a daily nightmare that you don’t gain a great deal from living there.
You might as well live outside the city for all its worth.
Even capital and infrastructure spending in the city centre is starting to become counter-productive to the city’s wider economy.
And I’m not so sure that it ever really did regenerate Birmingham’s wider economy. There is a narrative that capital and infrastructure spending regenerating the city centre in the 1980s and 1990s transformed the city.
There is another narrative developing challenging this in academic and other circles which suggests the opposite was and is now the case – here in Birmingham and in other cities around the world.
City centre-focused development can instead create short-term, sometimes low-wage impact only, and rarely changes the underlying fundamentals of the wider city economy.
It also leaves huge areas of cities behind untouched and, more importantly, huge segments of its citizens economically left behind with stubborn levels of high unemployment.
We do need a dartboard approach to our city’s development. But instead of our city having a just a bull’s eye we need one which, like a dartboard, has doubles and trebles of economic growth throughout.
* John Clancy is a Labour councillor for the Quinton ward
