Andy Burnham has announced an ambitious plan to create a Number 10 North, which is fine as far as it goes. But why stop there?
If Britain is serious about devolving power, levelling up, rebalancing the economy—or whatever this week’s slogan happens to be—then let’s get beyond relocating a few civil servants and start moving actual power. Not permanently. Just long enough to discover whether we mean any of it.
My modest proposal is this: create a House of Lords North.
Not a new House of Lords—heaven forbid. We already have more legislators than almost any democracy on Earth. Simply pack up the nation’s peers, their ermine, their red benches and their agreeable dining arrangements, and send them to one of the great Victorian town halls of northern England for, say, 10 years.
Rochdale, Leeds, Bradford, Oldham, Manchester itself. All boast magnificent civic buildings, erected in an age when Britain’s industrial cities believed they were running not merely themselves but the world. They have soaring halls, gothic grandeur, carved oak, stained glass and enough municipal self-confidence to make any peer of the realm feel—sort of—at home.
The symbolism matters as much as the logistics.
For generations, governments have promised to redistribute power from London while ensuring that almost every important institution remains in the capital. Civil servants have been encouraged to explore far-flung places such as Darlington, Wolverhampton and Glasgow, while ministers, legislators, lobbyists and journalists continue to orbit SW1 like electrons around a nucleus.
Moving one of the houses of parliament would say something no white paper ever has: that national politics can happen somewhere else.
Imagine Prime Minister’s Questions still taking place in Westminster while, 200 miles away, committees examine legislation in a restored Victorian town hall.
Imagine cabinet ministers boarding the morning train to Lancashire or Yorkshire to defend a bill before peers. Imagine political correspondents discovering that there really are decent restaurants beyond Westminster. Actually, the latter is unlikely to happen, since lobby hacks tend not to pay much attention to the upper house. But we can dream.
The economic effects would be modest. The psychological effects enormous.
Now, it does tend to be the case that whenever august organisations (think the BBC or Channel 4) announce they are relocating some of their operations out of London, a sizeable proportion of staff head for the door. We could not rule out the possibility that a good many peers would retire rather than face the indignity of either moving or commuting to faraway places of which they know little.
That will be tough, but I think Britain can take it. There are currently 774 peers. Suppose half decided to flounce out. Do we really think the country would be any less well governed? I suspect we could stagger on, don’t you? Burnham would, at a stroke, have achieved what House of Lords reformers have been rabbiting on about since Lloyd George. Reform, not by legislation, but by geography.
Meanwhile, the vacated upper house chamber offers up other opportunities. Start by moving the Commons from the green benches to the red benches. Why? Because the Palace of Westminster is falling to bits. The catalogue of decaying pipes, Victorian wiring, asbestos, leaking roofs and alarming fire risks has become a genre of literature in itself. Every serious review concludes that the building requires years of disruptive repair.
So let’s repair half of it.
Migrate the Lords north. Decant the Commons into the Lords chamber. Seal off the Commons end of the palace and rebuild it properly. When that’s finished, swap over and restore the Lords end.
No expensive temporary parliament. No giant white elephant on Horse Guards. No decade of wrangling over decant strategies. Just make use of the fact that parliament already contains two debating chambers.
Maybe this appetite for radical change could infect the King, just down the road. We have just stumped up well north of £350m to do up Buckingham Palace, only to learn that Charles has no intention of living there. Ditto any other royals. It is an unloved building used only for ceremonial occasions and as posh office space.
Is there any reason why the flunkies who service the monarchy must be housed in such an enormous building with the largest private garden in London—big enough to house 22 football pitches?
Could some of the functions of the royal household be performed equally well from Swansea, Norwich, Kendal or Dundee? If a core of them really needs to be in London, there is a vast amount of quality office space in and around Victoria which could work perfectly well, if not better.
Andy Burnham could then launch a national debate about what to do with the 775 rooms, the art collection, the grand halls... and the 39 acres of gardens.
The former chief whip Lord Ryder this week suggested in a letter to the Times that Charles might like to “grant a modest acreage” of the palace garden to ordinary people to create a new green corridor between Victoria Station and Hyde Park Corner.
But why a “modest acreage”? Why not hand it all over to the public? The King has an enormous castle, 40 minutes down the M4, which serves very well for state occasions, banquets, investitures and the like.
We’ve all put up with more than 15 years of belt-tightening and austerity. Lead by example? The monarchy has had a rough old year for reasons we needn’t rehearse. Wouldn’t it be a significant PR win to allow the public in and show that the royals are serious about downsizing?
So that’s it: pack the Lords up north, slimming down the upper house as you go, and refurbish the Palace of Westminster with the space you’ve freed up. Move the royal flunkies into bog-standard office space in Victoria and hand over Buckingham Palace to the people.
The King of the North may have started something…
