A £44bn boost for UK’s regional cities

Better transport, housing and other infrastructure could lead to a £44bn boost to UK’s regional cities.

In our first of four reports - focusing on the delivery aspect of capital investment - we find that insufficient investment in physical infrastructure, like transport and housing, is causing the UK’s regional cities to be difficult and expensive to live in. This costs us an estimated £44 billion a year in lost GDP - we call this ‘the growth gap’. It means economic benefits usually associated with bigger cities and its greater metropolitan areas just do not materialise.

The report makes 10 practical recommendations which, if implemented, would make the necessary investment in physical capital faster and cheaper. Therefore, enabling our regional cities to become the engines of growth and prosperity they can be. 

They range from national institutional reform - like the National Infrastructure Commission becoming more embedded within the national economic policy framework, including at fiscal events, becoming the “OBR for infrastructure”- to streamlining the process of getting smaller projects approved if they are explicitly targeted at agglomeration growth (for example, a transport link from a suburban town to a nearby city) by creating a new category of Regionally Significant Infrastructure Projects. 

Finally, we believe that protecting green spaces - vital to local quality of life and scientifically shown to increase happiness - does not have to mean our towns and cities are prevented from becoming engines of growth by a constricting green belt. We show how Denmark has allowed Copenhagen to bring prosperity to its citizens, and the rest of the country, while maintaining surrounding greenfield land through a Green Fingers approach to land designation. Holland maintains a Green Heart - a huge thinly populated area of natural beauty surrounded by the country’s biggest cities, thus is easily accessible to them all - in a ‘reverse green belt’ approach to planning.