Call for ministries to be relocated to the regions

A new report published today has called for entire Whitehall departments to be relocated to the regions.
The think tank, Catalyst, said the move is needed to help counter the population drift from regional cities to the South East, a fact confirmed by the 2001 census.
It suggests transferring departments such as the Ministry of Defence and the Home Office to cities such as Leeds, Manchester, Liverpool, Newcastle and Sheffield.
And it maintains that the government’s proposal to move 20,000 of the country’s 144,000 civil servants out of the south-east to the regions is not enough, putting forward the case for all ministries and ministers to be moved.
Its paper, to be presented at the annual conference of the Royal Geographical Society in London today, argues that moving ministries such as the Home Office to Birmingham or Leicester would bring the civil servants close to the multicultural areas whose problems they are trying to solve.