Deputy prime minister Nick Clegg today announced that eight English cities will be designated “core cities” with more freedom to invest in major projects.
In a speech in Leeds this morning, Clegg said that Manchester, Sheffield, Liverpool, Leeds, Newcastle, Nottingham, Bristol and Birmingham would become the “cradles of economic growth”.
The special status will give the cities’ councils more freedom from Whitehall to invest in and secure money for major spending projects.
The cities will get one consolidated capital pot to use as they see fit to boost economic activity.
The Coalition has committed itself to localising business rates and introducing tax increment financing to allow local authorities to borrow against those revenues in order to invest in development.
In the House of Commons, decentralisation minister Greg Clark said: “If you consider that our jobs in the future are likely to come from knowledge-intensive industries, cities are ideally placed to be the hosts of those industries.”
Clark said the eight had “great potential” to contribute to future growth and were the country’s “economic powerhouses”.
Don Baker, national head of rating at CVS, said: “The government now appears to be financially underpinning development projects in the cities, whereas the original TIF proposals – based on the expected business rate revenues from new developments – were not expecting the public purse to be providing this financial guarantee.”
Nick.whitten@estatesgazette.com
