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In 2021 I found myself in the Guildhall, in the middle of the square mile, the heart of Britain’s finance industry. Rishi Sunak was the keynote speaker at the gala dinner before the Global Investment Summit. Not the natural stomping ground for a working-class engineer from Middlesbrough.
I got talking to the CEO of a global engineering firm. I asked him if they would be investing in green hydrogen. He said, “I’m not going to invest half a billion pounds in plant and machinery unless I can be sure there’ll be a market for green hydrogen for the next 20 years, and the government has not given any signal that there will be.”
That one conversation sums up the need for Hostage Nation.
I applied that same principle to the skills budget. Adult education was devolved to the North of Tyne Combined Authority from 1 August 2020. Think forklift truck drivers, welders, chefs. Course completion rates were low. We spoke to learners and discovered that flexibility was an issue. People didn’t know what shifts they were on until late the night before, others had problems if grandma couldn’t pick the kids up from school. We spoke to the suppliers, often small training firms, and asked them how they could deliver more flexibility. The biggest problem was they were living hand to mouth, which meant that even just a couple of months before the annual contract renewal, their staff did not know if they had a job next year. What would be the biggest thing that we could do that would help, we asked them. Give us certainty, was the answer. We moved to three-year rolling contracts, they were able to plan their workforce, and for the same real terms budget increased training places from 22,000 a year to 35,000, with a completion rate of 96%.
In October 2021 I published Regional Wealth Generation, via the RSA. I was North of Tyne Mayor, and like all metro mayors I was frustrated that the government gave funding at short notice and for projects that weren’t always the best fit for my region. What we needed was fiscal devolution: mechanisms to earn money, capitalise regional wealth funds, and retention of payroll taxes from new job creation.
These were far from partisan proposals, and won broad support. Former Treasury Minister and Goldman Sachs chief economist Jim O’Neill wrote the foreword. Andy Burnham spoke publicly in support of Land Value Uplift. In a meeting with Treasury officials and ministers one civil servant said, “This is so compelling!” I’ve never seen a Treasury official get excited in a meeting before. Or since. I landed some of the principles in the 2024 North East Devolution Deal. Once I left office no one else picked up the baton. You can find the paper on the HostageNation.com website.
Hostage Nation is offered as a solution to these challenges – uncertainty of demand, stop-start development of workforce capacity, and the need for secure, innovative finance to boost our economy. For the avoidance of doubt, this is my personal proposal, and is not Green Party policy.