Cuts vulnerability highlights north-south divide
By politics.co.uk staff
England’s north-south divide will not be “shifted overnight”, Nick Clegg has said, after research revealed the north-east is the region with the greatest vulnerability to spending cuts.
Research for the BBC by Experian identified Middlesbrough as the most vulnerable of 324 local authority areas, with Hartlepool, Sunderland and Redcar and Cleveland all in the bottom 20.
The assessment, which took into account factors including workers’ earnings, unemployment, crime rates and local industry, concluded a wider north-south divide existed.
Many local authority areas of the north have a higher reliance on the public sector than some southern equivalents. St Albans in Hertfordshire and Elmbridge in Surrey were cited as the most resilient locations for cuts.
Deputy prime minister Mr Clegg told the Today programme he acknowledged the existence of a north-south divide.
“Even in the years of plenty over the last decade or so with a lot of government money going into areas of the north-east, north-west and where I am an MP South Yorkshire, we still have not been able to shift that divide,” he said.
“Of course, we appreciate we are dealing with a long-term problem about how you rebalance the British economy… away from an over-reliance on financial services, away from an over-reliance on public sector employment in parts of the country. That won’t be something we can do overnight.”
