From Clare Hayward MBE DL, Chair (Interim) of the NP11, for the Northern Agenda (dated 31 July 2023):
Reports in recent weeks suggest that the UK is starting to fall behind in the global race for green jobs and climate leadership.
Last month’s Climate Change Committee report was clear that the installation of new wind and solar farms and the upgrading of the electricity grid are still too slow to meet net zero targets, meanwhile plans to drop the UK’s flagship £11.6bn climate and nature funding pledge have come to light.
If urgent action is not taken, the UK risks missing a once-in-a-generation opportunity, highlighted by the Government’s own Skidmore Review, published earlier this year. At the same time, our European neighbours, China and the USA are accelerating efforts.
The North offers a ready-made solution to help the UK retain the global leadership position it set out at COP26. As a region, it already generates half of England’s renewable energy and is decarbonising at a rate 13% faster than the country as a whole.
The NP11’s ‘Net Zero North: Collaboration Powering Global Britain’ report established the practical steps needed to maintain that momentum: meeting our net zero targets while also delivering transformational economic growth and enhancing energy security through effective public-private sector partnership working across the North.
From coast to coast, the North is already delivering projects that have the potential to make our region a global net-zero innovation hub in areas such as hydrogen, offshore wind and carbon capture utilisation and storage (CCUS).
These projects are not ‘nice to haves’; they make prudent business sense. A relatively modest investment in regional leadership and capacity could unlock £6 billion of additional value for the UK economy.
Collaborative action across the North is already delivering results: the latest foreign direct investment (FDI) figures from the Department for Business and Trade showed that of the 211 Net Zero projects secured in the 2022-23 financial year, more than a fifth (46) were in the North, creating 4,183 jobs.
In April, the NP11 brought together 15 leading businesses, all of whom are contributing to our Northern Net Zero transformation, to call on the government to back the region in leading the UK’s zero carbon transition. We are looking forward to meeting with ministers in September to discuss how we can accelerate those collective ambitions.
This work demonstrates the power of partnership-working across sectors and across geographic boundaries. Business and civic leaders across the North are achieving great things individually. But by coming together and speaking with one Northern voice on the issues that affect our whole region, we can be even greater than the sum of our formidable parts.
We are seeing the results of this partnership in action across several sectors. Last year, we worked with partners including Arts Council England, the National Lottery Heritage Fund, Historic England, the Environment Agency alongside several others to develop a Place Strategy for the North.
This strategy will enable us to harness the region’s renowned cultural, heritage and natural assets to revitalise local economies and regenerate towns, cities and rural areas.
The research underpinning this work found that a partnership-based, pan-Northern approach to developing these assets – including collective funding bids and joined-up approaches to investment – could add £2.7bn to the North’s economy and realise other important social, environmental and health benefits.
We are now working with those partners to put this strategy into action so that we can reap the benefit for people, businesses, and communities. On innovation, the NP11 has established that a Life Science Supercluster for the North, could generate £16.2bn a year and double the number of jobs in the sector by 2040.
The NP11 has done this through effective collaboration with the North’s research-intensive universities, the NHS and the Northern Health Sciences Alliance (NHSA) demonstrating the North’s substantial contribution to UK growth and job creation in this sector.
We are also undertaking research to understand how to better join up the North’s innovation zones and clusters, such as the UK-first Investment Zone in South Yorkshire, to maximise economic benefit.
Pan-regional partnerships like ours provide a balance of scale and focus, allowing us to provide an influential voice nationally and globally alongside local knowledge and networks.
Likewise, cross-sector partnerships – embodied by LEPs in recent years – offer the best of both worlds, combining private sector innovation, ambition and long-term thinking with public sector place leadership, investment and democratic accountability.
Collaboration and focus will be crucial to our success as a region. Public-private sector partnership working is exactly that – a partnership – and as the country faces fresh economic and environmental challenges, I believe that the case for collaboration through organisations like the NP11 is more compelling now than it ever has been.
You can also view this opinion piece from Clare over on the Northern Agenda page.
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