Burnham’s growth plan risks repeating mistakes from the postwar era, according to a letter published on October 29. Past policies forced successful cities like Birmingham and London to share their wealth, which often caused local economic shrinkage. Modern planners should be careful, as moving jobs can damage delicate local roots.
We have tried "growth in every postcode" before (The Big Read, October 29). In the 1950s, Birmingham was booming with the highest wages in the UK and near-zero unemployment, thanks to a thriving car industry. Government decided Birmingham was doing too well, that its success must be shared with struggling areas, so the Board of Trade "refused certificates to build and expand [car] factories except in exceptional circumstances".
Longbridge, which had just launched the Mini, asked to expand its 20,000 workforce and was told "no". Those jobs were needed elsewhere. Geoffrey Lloyd, a Birmingham MP, complained the city was being used as an "industrial blood donor" for the UK's more anaemic regions. And it was.
So was London.
In 1964 George Brown, Labour's deputy leader and first secretary of state in Harold Wilson's government, banned new office approvals while the Location of Offices Bureau, which was set up a year earlier with a mandate to encourage the dispersal of office jobs from the centre of London, convinced existing office occupants to leave.
Inner city economic shrinkage, to redirect growth elsewhere, was a popular policy of both main parties after the second world war. Planners crafted stronger policy tools to stop cities growing upward or outward. Between 1946-2022, city housebuilding was half the rate of non-city housebuilding. Glaswegian planners, for example, fought to save their city, but Whitehall overruled them. The Housing and Town Development Act 1957 required Glasgow to lose 300,000 people; Glasgow itself had to pay those people to leave. By 2001, Glasgow had lost 500,000 residents.
Today's "growth in every postcode" is not postwar shrinkage, but modern planners must be cautious of their powers to do, and undo. The easiest way to create a job may be to grab one from somewhere else, but as anyone who has ever tried to move a garden plant knows, roots are delicate.