Devolution, industrial strategy and funding are creating possibilities, so it’s time to focus on deliver, writes Ian Liddell, Managing Director, Planning & Advisory at engineering and professional services firm WSP – one of our partners for the Tees Valley Development Plans Conference on the 16th May.

The most important question we can ask now about the Northern Powerhouse is what’s deliverable, and how. Deliverability is key because so much of the groundwork has now been done, and done well. Policy frameworks and governance are in place, metro mayors have arrived, and Transport for the North (TfN) has set out its vision. A lot of the funding has been signed off, in principle. The important thing now is to go from this stage to making things really happen.

Our success at WSP is fundamentally linked to the success of the Northern Powerhouse project. We share the same challenges in skills, and we’re thinking in the same time scales as TfN – with whom we’re working on two Strategic Development Corridors studies. We welcome TfN’s long-term vision and desire to engage all key stakeholders in the process, including the private sector. Because the private sector, and private funding, will be key in terms of delivery.

If you look at how devolution has worked in London, there are good examples of investment going in at an early stage to bring forward development. But these are smaller, simpler cases – not only does the North have roughly twice as many people as London, it’s geographically much bigger and more diverse in many ways.

Perhaps the best example, then, is one that hasn’t worked out as planned – the Thames Gateway. This area shares a lot with the North – it’s multi-authority, part industrial, part urban, part rual, and divided by a natural barrier (the Thames), so it needs strategic connections. The great plans for the Thames Gateway haven’t materialised yet and it is key to learn from this experience. That’s why delivery, tangible outcomes, should be the focus of conversation about the Northern Powerhouse today.

We need people with the skills to deliver on the Northern Powerhouse vision. People who can make business cases and strategic analysis, obtain planning consent, who can design and build. And the North has competitive advantages to offer these people. It has affordable housing, great universities and research institutions. Its tech and innovation startup ecosystem is blossoming, and it has a strong engineering base.

WSP has almost 2,000 people in the North, and 10% are graduates. We’re determined to involve them in designing the future of the places where they live, work and play, and enjoy the energy, opportunity and quality of life the North has to offer.

It’s also important to recognise that skills and mobility are linked. If you have a great skills base in Sheffield but they can’t travel to Manchester, they’ll stay in Sheffield. One of our challenges over the years was that we had offices in Manchester, Leeds, Liverpool and elsewhere that were self-contained. It’s really helped us as a business to have those offices working together and this is partly about travel time and partly about digital connections. It’s a microcosm of the North Powerhouse.

For that reason we’re combining our three Manchester offices this year, not simply because it makes economic sense but to address the challenges in the North, you need great collaboration between the different sectors. So by getting people into the same place, we’re increasing their productivity, their creativity and their collaboration.

That’s a big part of our vision for the North – a greater integration of different skill-sets and people. Our vision for the North is also about making it future ready. When thinking as far ahead as 2050 – and beyond – we have to anticipate how technological change is going to play out. Renewable energy, digital communication, autonomous vehicles and other innovations require us to think about where and how economic growth and demographic change will happen.

These are the kinds of things we’re working on in the Strategic Development Corridor studies that we’re doing for TfN at the moment, to set out the long-term requirements. It seems obvious, but many people forget that infrastructure takes a long time to deliver. Major infrastructure projects are multi-decade. And while the opening date might be 15-20 years in the future, that’s only the opening date; it needs to be fit for many decades of use after that.

The challenges, too, can show us how best to plan for the North. Political risk will now show itself not so much in terms of policy but in funding. It’s the government funding and de-risking of projects by the public sector that then attracts private sector funding. To safeguard this, it’s important to understand the benefits first. In our work on HS2, we witnessed the difference an assessment of the wider economic benefits and a focused engagement and communications drive made to the project. Clearly, to have holistic decisionmaking, these more widespread, long-term effects need to be thought about from the start, and we welcome that this is the approach taken by TfN.

Devolution has already made a huge difference in terms of taking away some of the uncertainties that cities in particular have had, through their dependence for funding on central government. Their planning powers, the powers they have to raise and retain funding, have made a big difference in helping them to plan for the longer term. Importantly, it has also helped with the narrative setting. There’s still more to be done in terms of the geographical roll-out of devolution. And it should be kept under review whether further devolution of statutory functions such as planning and funding should happen – it may well be a benefit, but we can use the piecemeal nature of devolution to see how this kind of development works out in practice.

The industrial strategy, the clean growth plan and the 25-year environment plan will also make a difference. I welcome the construction sector deal for as a key component as industry gears for delivery. With different parts of the country being tilted towards different sectors, it’s crucial to ensure that they’re connected, for a country that works cohesively and attracts investment from around the world. Simply by identifying the region as a “powerhouse”, too, the government has already gone some way towards making the region globally relevant for investment from abroad after Brexit, and we hope to be able to continue helping local authorities turn that attractiveness into real investment.

The North has not been politically united since Roman times. There’s a temptation to think that because devolution has happened, it is united now, but we recognise – because we work in different areas across the North – that it’s still a political and cultural patchwork. Infrastructure can connect communities into a cohesive whole, without forcing them to lose their identity. I am confident that the successful delivery of future ready infrastructure in the North, will help Britain stay attractive and prosperous well into the 21st century, and look forward to WSP playing its part in this dynamic journey from plans to reality. This article by Ian Liddell of WSP was first published in NewStatesman’s The Northern Powerhouse: Back On Track.