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The Northern Cities | Governance & Infrastructure (including HS3)

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#1 ·
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Liverpool reflected in the Mersey: "Collaborating with other cities
and other countries is the future, and it helps to be able to shape
much of that future ourselves," says elected mayor Joe Anderson.



Will the north follow Scotland and search for greater power?

The most remarkable thing about the fast train between Liverpool and Leeds is that it doesn't exist. Sure, some trains move more swiftly than others, but there's none that even the most hucksterish rail operative would call fast. Not in 2014, between two of England's leading cities, both with aspirations to have futures as well as pasts.

So it is that an hour and three-quarters after setting off from Liverpool Lime Street, you arrive in Leeds, 60-odd miles away. A London train leaving Liverpool at the same time for the 210-mile journey would arrive only 20 minutes later. And that train would be full of people doing business, preparing for meetings. The Leeds train is not full of anyone much at all.

"Yep, not the greatest of journeys," says Keith Wakefield, leader of Leeds city council when I fetch up in his office, "but I've got a better illustration." A better illustration, that is, of how the northern cities fail to connect. Manchester, Leeds's neighbour across the Pennines, is 35 miles away or an hour by train. "But only half a per cent of Leeds people ever go to Manchester; and it's the same the other way round."

Wakefield's "half per cent" statistic might seem arcane but it says plenty about how England operates. Open a map and you can draw a neat, relatively short line linking Liverpool, Manchester and Leeds, moving across country. But people and businesses, tend not to move this way, as Wakefield suggests. Northerners who leave home, whether for the day or for good, tend to head south. All roads – and fast trains – lead to London.​


http://www.theguardian.com/cities/2014/aug/31/one-north-regeneration-railways-jobs-cities

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Manchester town hall: northern leaders have overcome past divisions
to bring forward a coherent plan for investment.



Whichever way Scotland votes, more power must be devolved in England

Even if the people of Scotland vote against independence, all of the mainstream political parties have promised Holyrood greater powers and responsibilities. If the nation avoids separation, this could still precipitate a constitutional conundrum south of the border as England – led by its core cities – asks "What about us?" The upcoming conference season will be a good time for politicians to offer some answers.

IPPR North has long argued that greater English devolution can both unlock national economic prosperity and drive a new wave of public service reform.​


http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/aug/31/however-scotland-votes-england-must-change

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Why the ‘One North’ transport proposals make my heart sink


According to a popular online journey planner, I could at this moment leave my front door in south Manchester and, using public transport, be in the centre of Leeds in an hour and a quarter. I could travel to the centre of Liverpool in one hour and two minutes. Getting to the large Sharston industrial estate, in south Manchester, would also take me exactly one hour and two minutes.

As a proud resident of the north of England, I am not lacking in visions of how life here could be improved. Strangely, these have never included taking a diagonal sash stretching from Newcastle to Liverpool and transforming it into an ersatz imitation of the south-east commuter belt. Economic investment and regeneration are desperately needed, of course, and perhaps I should be cheering the proposals announced today by the civic leaders of five big cities to improve transport infrastructure to the tune of £15bn and create an economic powerhouse under the banner One North.

In truth, the plans and their paucity of imagination makes my heart sink. Who will really benefit from these developments? It is unlikely to be the poorest, the jobless, those on the merry-go-round of insecure, low-paid employment. People in poverty need employment opportunities close to home, not because they do not have the time to travel, but because they do not have the money. Despite being the most densely populated major country in Europe, England has longer and more expensive commutes than any competing country, with train passengers in particular paying up to three times as much in real terms to get to and from work each day. I can only shrug at proposals to make public transport faster, when the real need is to make them cheaper.​


http://www.theguardian.com/commenti...h-transport-proposals-england-northern-cities

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#61 ·
Liverpool's surrounding urban area doesn't even have a population of 1.5 million, so I'm not sure how you figure out that it's a 'city' of 1.5 million people. In fact almost all your numbers are of dubious provenance, unless you've got access to satellite imagery good enough to count people. I think I'll stick with the urban statistics from the census, in which case Liverpool plus Birkenhead has a population of just under 1.2 million, West Yorkshire about 1.7, Birmingham 2.4 and Manchester 2.5.

We can argue about how much of Greater Manchester is really 'Manchester' but for the purposes of this discussion it doesn't matter. If you want to expand an urbanised area to build a larger and more productive city it is far easier to do it if you start with a bigger urban area to begin with. In fact, it could be argued that a region like Greater Manchester or West Yorkshire, where multiple towns are connected by narrow paths of urbanity through semi-rural countryside is far easier to densify than a more consistently built up space like Liverpool or Birmingham. There are large areas of Green Belt in various parts of Greater Manchester that are largely separated from the countryside by these corridors and could be built on without appearing to vastly expand the urban area at the expense of rural England.

For example the area between Timperley, Hale Barns and Wythenshawe in south Manchester is a piece of green belt completely surrounded by urban Greater Manchester and right next to the planned Airport HS2 station. If new houses were built on it at the average density of the GM urban area it could provide housing for over 30,000 people, while making no impact on the continuous rural environment of Cheshire. There are similar spaces in the space between Salford and Wigan, Wilmslow and Cheadle, Bury and Bolton and Middleton and Rochdale. I'm not as familiar with West Yorkshire, but I'm sure that similar 'semi-rural' areas could be used if we did want to enlarge these cities.
 
#62 ·
Ah of course, Liverpool's practically just a village. Manchester's a big city. Make the point again, though, just to make sure you're really believed?

Google earth, maps and other satellite imagery must be a real pain for you, as it enables people to see for themselves:
- Birmingham , a core city of 2.5m surrounded by sporadic urban/rural region of 3.5m.
- Manchester, a core city of 1.5m surrounded by sporadic urban/rural region of 2.7m.
- Liverpool, a core city of 1.5m surrounded by a sporadic urban/rural region of 2.4m.
- Leeds, an already rural/urban core city of 700k, loosely connected to Bradford 300k, surrounded by a largely rural county and market towns/cities in their own right.
- Sheffield as above but slightly smaller again.

When the LCR doesn't even include all of Liverpool's contiguous build up, your comments about not being under bounded (while the county of greater Manchester includes Wigan and Bolton) sound rather silly.

Did you know that Manchester will still be a big city even if Liverpool is acknowledged as being one too? Just checking.
The LCR is an official construct, population 1.56m. The fact that it includes Southport (which really belongs in the wider metro rather than urban pop) compensated for by that contiguous parts elsewhere are not included.

The 2.4m is also an official comparative figure, created by counting the area surrounding the central urban mass in the same way that the similarly constituted county of Greater Manchester is counted.

Those that have spent plenty of time on the Liverpool forums should really be aware of this.

Enlarge what you feel you need to, tbh. I do wonder, though, what people in the south of the Greater Manchester county will think of the concept of their towns and villages being infilled.
 
#63 ·
Round and round the garden, like a teddy bear. One Step, two steps and argue about how big Liverpool is. Again. And again. And again.
It really is quite simple to grasp.

Area around Liverpool expanded to 1200km2 (the size of GM) will contain more people.
Area around Manchester contracted to 645km2 (the size of Merseyside) will contain fewer people.

In other words similar size areas around both cities contain similar amounts of people, irrespective of boundaries. No amount of academic mumbo jumbo can alter this fact. Neither will denial of the obvious.
 
#64 ·
The idea that somehow Liverpool is vastly underbounded compared to Greater Manchester is flawed. If we take the LCR population figure you quote then only 70% of that population of the LCR actually lives in the core urban area. In Greater Manchester it is more than 90%. That's not to say that places like Widnes etc aren't economically or socially linked to Liverpool, but that their connection is qualitatively different to (for example) Bury. The areas in the 'larger' Greater Manchester are intrinsic parts of the urban area in a way that those in the 'larger' Liverpool would not be.

Your 2.3 million Liverpool isn't the equivalent of Greater Manchester, but of the wider Manchester City Region (including places like Warrington, High Peak, the East Cheshire towns, Rossendale etc.) which has a population of about 3.4 million people. In this wider Liverpool region less than 50% of the population actually lives in urban Liverpool/Birkenhead. It's probably a fair reflection of Liverpool's wider economic footprint, but it is not a particularly useful measure of the urban area centred on Liverpool.

I'm not actually advocating a vast enlargement of Greater Manchester (or any other city). I can see possible benefits from doing so, but I would imagine that there'd be lots of local opposition and real loss of quality of life for many residents, on top of the massive costs Vulcan identified. However the more tendrilous urban form of Greater Manchester and West Yorkshire would appear to make it less disruptive than it would be for example to fill in the Meriden Gap or to completely urbanise the Wirral. It would still be difficult, but certainly more feasible.

Anyway, for now it's largely irrelevant. For political reasons local and national government appears to be pushing the chimera of a multi-centric Northern city as the path to agglomeration. We'll have to wait to see what David Higgins suggests, but the One North proposals very much refused to place cities in a hierarchy, even when there are obvious reasons to prioritise some cities and their connections (Liverpool-Manchester, Leeds-Manchester) over others. Of course the natural hierarchy still exists, but the legal, institutional and funding changes required to close the Zipf gap are not planned, and without them rapid focussed growth is an impossibility, even if we considered it desirable.
 
#65 ·
How ironic, given that Cheshire as a County Council no longer exists.

However, the main point of my posts was to simply point out that if the area surrounding Liverpool is doubled, so that it equals that of GM, then the respective sizes of the populations would be much closer than those of Merseyside and GM.
Even more ironic; is that Redcliffe-Maud proposed a two-tier municipal structure in the Metropolitan Areas - boroughs and city regions - and single tier authorites elsewhere. Whereas, following Thatcher's abolition of the Met County Councils and GLC, we now have single tier boroughs in the Metropolitan areas; and (moslty) two-tier authorities in the shire counties. All purely to preserve large numbers of safe but titchy electoral wards for Tories to be elected to.

A lot of the history of English municipal reorganisation since the 1980s has been predicated on realising that Redcliffe-Maud was right and Thatcher (and Heath) were wrong.
 
#66 ·
I think Derek Senior's conclusions in part two of the LGC report were more convincing than Radcliffe Maude's in part one. Unitary authorities are too small for the wider economic planning role that we need local government to perform, but regional governments too far from the functional economic geography. The whole LEP programme is a (deeply flawed) reimagining of Senior's city regions plan.
 
#67 ·
I think Derek Senior's conclusions in part two of the LGC report were more convincing than Radcliffe Maude's in part one. Unitary authorities are too small for the wider economic planning role that we need local government to perform, but regional governments too far from the functional economic geography. The whole LEP programme is a (deeply flawed) reimagining of Senior's city regions plan.
The problem with Derek Senior's proposals was that it came as an all-or-nothing package. In order to establish city-regions where they made sense - Liverpool, Manchester, Leeds, Sheffield, etc) Senior fitted dstricts everywhere in the country within one city region or another. But in a large proportion of the county - especially in the South - these upper tier areas followed no functional logic or common history at all. It is no accident, in my view, that subsequent re-organisations outside the Metropoilitan areas have almost all proceeded through the creation of new unitary authorities out of former two-tier shire/district authorities. Outside of metopolitan urban areas there is an awful lot of England where unitaries work better.
 
#68 ·
The problem with Derek Senior's proposals was that it came as an all-or-nothing package. In order to establish city-regions where they made sense - Liverpool, Manchester, Leeds, Sheffield, etc) Senior fitted dstricts everywhere in the country within one city region or another. But in a large proportion of the county - especially in the South - these upper tier areas followed no functional logic or common history at all. It is no accident, in my view, that subsequent re-organisations outside the Metropoilitan areas have almost all proceeded through the creation of new unitary authorities out of former two-tier shire/district authorities. Outside of metopolitan urban areas there is an awful lot of England where unitaries work better.
But there are functional economic regions in the south bigger than the current unitary authorities. I agree that these areas probably don't need quite the same powers as those governing larger cities, but they still need something between Westminster and the local council. Look at Reading for example, it's a thriving area with an economic region far outside the very narrow borough boundaries but no ability to influence areas outside them. Or the South Hampshire area, very productive by national standards but with far from ideal planning or infrastructure planning capabilities.

City regional models do tend to suffer in much of the south east due to the overwhelming dominance of London, but I'd argue that outside that they're much more appropriate.
 
#69 · (Edited)
The idea that somehow Liverpool is vastly underbounded compared to Greater Manchester is flawed. If we take the LCR population figure you quote then only 70% of that population of the LCR actually lives in the core urban area. In Greater Manchester it is more than 90%. That's not to say that places like Widnes etc aren't economically or socially linked to Liverpool, but that their connection is qualitatively different to (for example) Bury. The areas in the 'larger' Greater Manchester are intrinsic parts of the urban area in a way that those in the 'larger' Liverpool would not be.

Your 2.3 million Liverpool isn't the equivalent of Greater Manchester, but of the wider Manchester City Region (including places like Warrington, High Peak, the East Cheshire towns, Rossendale etc.) which has a population of about 3.4 million people. In this wider Liverpool region less than 50% of the population actually lives in urban Liverpool/Birkenhead. It's probably a fair reflection of Liverpool's wider economic footprint, but it is not a particularly useful measure of the urban area centred on Liverpool.

I'm not actually advocating a vast enlargement of Greater Manchester (or any other city). I can see possible benefits from doing so, but I would imagine that there'd be lots of local opposition and real loss of quality of life for many residents, on top of the massive costs Vulcan identified. However the more tendrilous urban form of Greater Manchester and West Yorkshire would appear to make it less disruptive than it would be for example to fill in the Meriden Gap or to completely urbanise the Wirral. It would still be difficult, but certainly more feasible.

Anyway, for now it's largely irrelevant. For political reasons local and national government appears to be pushing the chimera of a multi-centric Northern city as the path to agglomeration. We'll have to wait to see what David Higgins suggests, but the One North proposals very much refused to place cities in a hierarchy, even when there are obvious reasons to prioritise some cities and their connections (Liverpool-Manchester, Leeds-Manchester) over others. Of course the natural hierarchy still exists, but the legal, institutional and funding changes required to close the Zipf gap are not planned, and without them rapid focussed growth is an impossibility, even if we considered it desirable.
As has been pointed out before, there is no such thing as a wider Manchester City region beyond the county boundaries - the county of Greater Manchester is the wider city region, with it already including those surrounding towns that are economically linked but not part of the conurbation. Certainly nothing like 90% of that county is city.

You're happy to make up daft figures of your own to blow hot air up your own city's backside, yet seem indignant at the the very basic, understandable, and obvious official designations used in other cities. Such is your apparent terror that Liverpool and Manchester may be seen as equals, you blow the borders of "manchester" even wider. I saw talk a lot of talk about Metrolink to Eccles on the DLR thread the other day - I guess now we know why. London here you come.

Your knowledge of the 1.56m Liverpool City Region (and the surrounding wider 2.4m metropolitan region) is Henry's Cat-esque.
 
#70 ·
Centurio, unlike you I haven't made anything up. I've simply accessed data produced by the Office of National Statistics (and other public agencies) to support my case. They say that the urban regions around Manchester, Leeds and Birmingham are all far bigger than that around Liverpool. These stats say that Greater Manchester has an urban population of 2.5 million and a county one of 2.7 million. The former figure is about 90% of the latter. That doesn't mean 90% of the county is 'city' (whatever that means) but it is part of one single urban area. This is an indisputable fact. You can argue about how important you think it is, but from the perspective of increasing the size/population of urban areas I'd say it's pretty crucial to know how big they are to begin with.

You're the only one who seems concerned by the idea of 'equality' between cities. I'd argue that given all cities grow out of their own circumstances with their own political, demographic and economic contexts that it's a meaningless concept. Manchester and Liverpool are peers because they're cities of a similar order of magnitude in the same country, but they're too different to be equal even if they were exactly the same size. I object to the idea that Greater Manchester or West Yorkshire somehow fully encapsulate the entire hinterland of their core cities within their boundaries not because I worry about perceptions of equality, but because it's patently false. The links between Harrogate and Leeds or East Cheshire and Manchester are far stronger than those between any of the wider halo of LCR areas and Liverpool itself.

Anyway, I think this conversation has run its course. You don't really know enough about these issues to make it worth talking to.
 
#71 ·
But there are functional economic regions in the south bigger than the current unitary authorities. I agree that these areas probably don't need quite the same powers as those governing larger cities, but they still need something between Westminster and the local council. Look at Reading for example, it's a thriving area with an economic region far outside the very narrow borough boundaries but no ability to influence areas outside them. Or the South Hampshire area, very productive by national standards but with far from ideal planning or infrastructure planning capabilities.

City regional models do tend to suffer in much of the south east due to the overwhelming dominance of London, but I'd argue that outside that they're much more appropriate.
Both Redcliffe Maud and Senior did propose an additional structure of provincial/regional authorities to co-ordinate high-level planning; I think Senior had five, while R-M had something close to the nine eventual GOR regions. But in both sets of proposals these provinces were envisaged as exercising supervisory functions devolved from Whitehall, not as second-guessing local decision making in districts or city regions.
 
#72 ·
Perhaps we should return to a Mesopotamian system of self financing and managed city states with only a few powers (such as legal systems) being kept at Westminster. That way all the cities can stop moaning about central government and get on with things.
 
#73 ·
Both Redcliffe Maud and Senior did propose an additional structure of provincial/regional authorities to co-ordinate high-level planning; I think Senior had five, while R-M had something close to the nine eventual GOR regions. But in both sets of proposals these provinces were envisaged as exercising supervisory functions devolved from Whitehall, not as second-guessing local decision making in districts or city regions.
What I like about Senior's idea was that they corresponded to real economic and social spheres in which people lived their lives. So local services were determined at a local level, and only those that crossed these boundaries had a second tier to administer. He applied it very closely to real human behaviours (putting frequently used services where people travel to frequently) and let the structures emerge from that. It's far better from a civic engagement point of view if services are linked to settlements rather than the abstract entities of unitary government, and Senior did at least try to anchor his authorities in the spaces where people were likely to move. Radcliffe Maud saw things from a much more top down perspective, how services should be delivered most efficiently, not how people will engage with them.
 
#74 ·
So I've pulled the latest ONS stats on population (and working age too)

Right now we have
Code:
Metropolitan Area               Population Working Age
================ =              ========== ===========
West Midlands (Met County)    2,783,475  1,714,463
Greater Manchester (Met County)    2,714,944  1,717,634
West Yorkshire (Met County)    2,252,192  1,414,871
Merseyside (Met County)            1,386,589    873,255
South Yorkshire (Met County)    1,358,153    854,070
Tyne and Wear (Met County)    1,113,577    713,140
However if you look at the population growth rates and recalculate these for ten years on (2023) the picture is subtly different...
Code:
Metropolitan Area               Population Working Age
================ =              ========== ===========
West Midlands (Met County)    2,999,674  1,791,938
Greater Manchester (Met County)    2,845,579  1,752,367
West Yorkshire (Met County)    2,370,226  1,439,330
Merseyside (Met County)            1,395,852    879,089
South Yorkshire (Met County)    1,419,704    892,776
Tyne and Wear (Met County)    1,168,649    748,409
So West Midlands is growing slightly faster than Manchester but it has lots of youngsters right now so whilst Manchester has the working age population edge right now it won't in 2023.
And South Yorkshire will push Merseyside into fifth place in both population and working age population some time in 2018 because of the difference in growth rates in the two areas
Well I don't claim any great knowledge of these things, but those figures appear to closely match the real world rail passenger figures from these respective areas. So I would say they are probably the most accurate we've seen.
 
#75 ·
I cannot believe Cenurio is fighting the ONS statistics - clearly he is some demigod who knows best of all.

Seems to me that he's decide that Liverpool is far bigger than it is by annexing land that doesn't belong to it. But Super-Lamb-Banana Man, you miss the irrefutable fact that any city if it annexes enough land WILL become the biggest and most populous city IN the land.

Manchester City Region does exist as a concept by the way - its pretty much Greater Manchester plus Cheshire
 
#76 ·
I cannot believe Cenurio is fighting the ONS statistics - clearly he is some demigod who knows best of all.

Seems to me that he's decide that Liverpool is far bigger than it is by annexing land that doesn't belong to it. But Super-Lamb-Banana Man, you miss the irrefutable fact that any city if it annexes enough land WILL become the biggest and most populous city IN the land.

Manchester City Region does exist as a concept by the way - its pretty much Greater Manchester plus Cheshire
Would that be the statistics that tell the world that birkenhead is nothing to do with liverpool, let alone bromborough?

"AGMA have published that in their literature "'Manchester' and 'city region' are used to refer to Greater Manchester, which is the ten local authority Districts of Bolton, Bury, Oldham, Manchester, Rochdale, Stockport, Salford, Tameside, Trafford and Wigan"."

If there even exists such a thing officially, it's the county of GM and that's it.

Liverpool City Region isn't something which exists informally, it exists formally and is governed by the Liverpool City Region Combined Authority. The official population of these 6 core boroughs is 1.56m. This core urban area sits in a wider metropolitan area numbering 2.4m people.
 
#77 ·
The ONS statistics do exclude the Wirral from the Liverpool Built Up Area, but in everything I've quoted they've been included. The exclude it for a reason, but for my purposes there's no need to so I added up the population of the Liverpool BUA and the Birkenhead BUA to produce a fairer figure.

But your 2.3 million people definition isn't official, it's just an unofficial description produced by a government agency for a policy report. This is exactly the same as the larger Manchester City Region definition I gave earlier. If you accept one is realistic then you have to accept the other, or you can reject them both. But you can't have a 2.3 million Liverpool and a 2.5 million Manchester because the inconsistencies in how you've come to those figures make any comparison meaningless.
 
#78 · (Edited)
The ONS statistics do exclude the Wirral from the Liverpool Built Up Area, but in everything I've quoted they've been included. The exclude it for a reason, but for my purposes there's no need to so I added up the population of the Liverpool BUA and the Birkenhead BUA to produce a fairer figure.

But your 2.3 million people definition isn't official, it's just an unofficial description produced by a government agency for a policy report. This is exactly the same as the larger Manchester City Region definition I gave earlier. If you accept one is realistic then you have to accept the other, or you can reject them both. But you can't have a 2.3 million Liverpool and a 2.5 million Manchester because the inconsistencies in how you've come to those figures make any comparison meaningless.
It's not at all inconsistent, it's the opposite of inconsistent, because while your made up figure is simply to portray your city as being larger than it is (when in fact its county already encompasses far flung unconnected towns), the wider metropolitan region referred to by Liverpool is simply reflective of the reality around it, solely for the purposes of being able to make proper like for like comparisons.

The line you'll spin is that Manchester is a larger city worth so much more than its neighbour. The truth, however, is that GM/wider Manchester city region is 2.7m pop with £48bn gva, whereas wider LCR is 2.4m pop and £43bn gva (2011). A basic knowledge of geography and use of satellite maps is enough for anyone to see the sense in this like for like comparison. Liverpool's met county is too small, Manchester's is too big, but the cities are and always have been pretty much equal. Whether you want to believe in Manchester the mythical metropolitan giant or not.

You dislike like for like comparisons because they blow your notion of Manchester being the be all and end all as far as the north west goes. Ultimately, we are pushed into either forcefully spelling the truth out, or being content to sit and get half (or less) of what Manchester gets while still having to accommodate a 2.4m metro area. Those days are over, and people like you will just have to get used to it.
 
#79 · (Edited)
I cannot believe Cenurio is fighting the ONS statistics - clearly he is some demigod who knows best of all.

Seems to me that he's decide that Liverpool is far bigger than it is by annexing land that doesn't belong to it. But Super-Lamb-Banana Man, you miss the irrefutable fact that any city if it annexes enough land WILL become the biggest and most populous city IN the land.

Manchester City Region does exist as a concept by the way - its pretty much Greater Manchester plus Cheshire
That will be the same Cheshire which was part of the Mersey Regional Health Authority when it existed. The same Cheshire whose police force is/was proposed to merge with that of Merseyside.
 
#80 ·
This thread is everything wrong with the UK forum in one condensed form.

How can you guys work as an analogous city network when you bicker about irrelevant stuff?

Manchester will never get the buy-in from its bitter neighbour to play fair. The be-chipped shoulders are endless and even from this board it is striking that this attitude of superiority and disbelief at the current trajectory of Liverpool vs its days of grandeur is innate and monocultural somehow.

Manchester is better off continuing to grow on its own momentum, dominate the region and attract workers to its own centralised core. The TPE/Chat Moss works and Northern Hub will make it even easier for people to commute there. Equivalent wires on the eastern side will do the same. Liverpool can be a retail/hospitality centre and place of local government/education/health employment for its residents.
 
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