Darlington Economic Campus - escaping the London bubble to aid levelling up?

Shrugging off his natural cynicism, Arlen Pettitt, our Head of Policy and Campaigns, reflects on a recent assessment of the effectiveness of the relocation of civil service jobs to the Darlington Economic Campus.

I think most of us would struggle to point to a tangible policy that shows 'levelling up' in practice.

It's such a loose concept that while we’re struggling to name something that’s making a difference, the Government can happily point to almost anything and say it’s helping the levelling up agenda.

It was with that cynicism that I viewed the announcement - way back in March 2020 - of civil service jobs moving out of London.

Rishi Sunak - then Chancellor - announced the move in a pre-lockdown Budget which rapidly unraveled, but it wasn’t until the following Budget, March 2021, that Darlington was announced as the chosen location.

While the logic was sound - move civil servants out of the London bubble, expose them to other experience and influences, thus improving policy-making.

But even at the point of announcement, the question in my mind was whether they could shift genuinely substantive roles out of Whitehall and work out a way to integrate teams from multiple departments - albeit all with economically-relevant functions - into a single policy-making whole.

So, I read with interest an analysis of the success of the Darlington Economic Campus (DEC), which was published by the Institute for Government (IfG) earlier this month.

If you aren’t familiar with the IfG, they are a think tank focused on improving how government works, and they are most well-known for their Ministers Reflect series, in which they have somehow managed to get nearly 150 former ministers to speak openly and candidly about the realities of being in government.

In their assessment of the DEC, the IfG paint a largely positive picture.

They say 80% of staff on the site have been recruited from the North, while 20% have relocated from London - which seems like it’s probably the ideal spread.

The ‘campus’ approach, which brings together officials from multiple departments - including the Treasury, trade, education and business - has benefits for coherent policymaking, exposing people to different influences, both in terms of departmental thinking and the influence of being in the North.

Ministers and senior civil servants have shown a commitment to the project, being present in Darlington and allowing a hybrid approach to work which keeps Darlington-based staff in the loop and in meetings, even when they are taking place in London.

It’s grown rapidly too, from the initially planned 750 roles to more than 1,400.

The report sounds a few notes of caution: will the commitment shown survive beyond a change in government? Will they continue to be able to hire locally, given a relatively small pool of policy skills? Can the rest of the civil service continue to adapt to make best use of non-London campuses?

Overall, my feeling is that those are problems or concerns which can be overcome.

The timing of the move came when there was a broad, cross-party commitment to rebalancing the geography of the economy, which means long-term commitment to the new campus should survive any change of personnel in government.

Beyond that, the initial transfer and creation of roles came at a time when the pandemic was triggering lots of people to reassess their working lives - the 20% relocation of staff out of London probably saved some institutional knowledge by keeping people in the civil service when they may have drifted out of it. That’s a stark contrast to the relocation of the ONS to Newport in the mid-2000s, which saw an exodus of experienced staff and left the office trying to rebuild its teams.

As for adapting to change, every organisation is, and has been, going through that in the past few years - changing ways of working, the rise of hybrid and remote roles, different demands and expectations from employees. The civil service is no different, and the structural change caused by the creation of the DEC hopefully changed approaches in a way which benefited more widely as well.

There’s still a cultural shift that needs to happen - when I speak to friends and colleagues in the civil service, proximity to ministers still holds an understandable cachet, and visits to the Treasury mothership on Horseguards are still special occasions for those with a home base of Darlo. But, given time, that shift should come - to enough of a degree to improve policymaking anyway.

There’s more we can do as a region as well, to support the DEC and make sure it works as hard as possible for the North East.

There are two primary aspects to that - skills and engagement.

We need to make sure we have a good pipeline of policy-related skills in the region, befitting the roles in Darlington and the surrounding ecosystem that will build up because of the DEC. That means those of us with some experience in those areas have a responsibility to help develop that talent, by being open and sharing what we know and how we approach our work.

On engagement, we need to cast off that cynicism I was carrying when the announcement was first made, and enter into dialogues as positively as we can with officials based in Darlington - 80% of them are ‘of the North’ with all the understand that brings, and the other 20% have chosen to be there - presumably with open eyes and minds.

The more we engage, the more valuable we make the campus, and the more likely we are to get good policy for the long term.

Featured image by Nik Guiney on Unsplash