On Monday, the unimaginatively but accurately named Northern Fail app listed 327 routes run by Northern railway that had either been fully or partially cancelled. This seems like a lot but, unless you live in the north, you probably wouldn’t have been aware of it. Unlike the trials and tribulations of Southern or, more recently, Thameslink, northern infrastructure problems rarely make the national news.
It’s not exactly a mystery why this is. Most of the people who write the news live within the London commuter belt so the failures of the rail company they take to work is obviously going to be more salient than the failures of the rail companies they don’t. But at the risk of being a professional northerner about this, we have train cancellations galore round these parts.
The knock-on effect from the Thameslink problems made Monday particularly bad, but Northern is so bad, so regularly, that Andy Burnham, the mayor of Greater Manchester, has called for an inquiry into the operator. It was reported yesterday that about 50 schoolchildren were left on a train platform in Ulverston, with the next train cancelled, because they could not all fit into the single carriage train that turned up. The Manchester Evening News calculated that Northern had cancelled 900 trains in the two weeks before “Meltdown Monday”, leading them to ask: “How bad does a northern rail operator actually have to be for action to be taken?”
Having said that, at least the north-west has a railway system to get regular delays and cancellations on. In the north-east, few commuters will have been affected by the crisis on Monday because there are barely any trains to begin with. If you want to commute from Darlington to Middlesbrough – a half-hour journey – and get there before 9am, there are three trains you can take, one of which leaves at 6am and all of which are two-carriage Pacer trains from the 1980s.
This reflects the absolutely dire level of investment everywhere except London. The thinktank IPPR North reported last year that a third of all transport investment moneywas going to the capital. An analysis in 2015 of the government’s national infrastructure pipeline by the Sheffield Political Economy Research Institute showed that London was due for infrastructure investment of £5,305 per head, while the north-east was due to get £414.
The effect of this is evident in the high level of inequality across the UK. Regional disparities are among the highest in the OECD. According to Eurostat figures, we are the only large economy in the EU with regions in the richest and the poorest income brackets. However, as Philip McCann, the chair in urban and regional economics at Sheffield University Management School argues, the London-centricity of the UK’s political and media establishment leaves people “largely unaware of how weak are the UK’s productivity levels”. While discussion of London’s performance dominates, McCann points out that “the London regional economy does not even remotely represent or reflect the UK economy as a whole”. London’s performance is counteracted by shockingly poor performance in the regions so, considered as a whole, the UK languishes in the doldrums.
In other words, London-centric reporting putting more weight on Thameslink timetabling issues than far more serious failures in the north isn’t just a case of mildly irritating capital-centric chauvinism, but a small facet of a deep ignorance about the state of the nation outside the M25 that is so pervasive it’s actually dragging down the GDP of the whole country.
Perhaps it’s time for the London establishment to acknowledge that its failure to pay attention to and invest in the rest of the country is bad for everyone, including them.
• Phil McDuff writes on economics and social policy