UK government urged to devolve more powers to the North to help increase funding for infrastructure

The new "revenue raising and borrowing powers" could be used by a new Council of the North, that the report said should be established, to bring together local authority leaders, metropolitan mayors, businesses and academics to "design, plan and deliver appropriate infrastructure across the region that will match its needs and priorities".

Infrastructure experts Nick Ogden and Natalie Trainor of Pinsent Masons, the law firm behind Out-Law.com, sat on the steering group which helped inform and develop the report.

According to the report (32-page / 5.45MB PDF), despite the government's ambition for a so-called 'Northern Powerhouse', the area is currently "underperforming". It said, amongst other things, that productivity in the North is 11% lower than the UK average. To become "a truly global-leading region", the North should be allowed to "drive its own future" and develop its own strategies on infrastructure.

Current proposed funding for infrastructure in the North from central government "will not deliver the level of change required for the economic opportunity of the Northern Powerhouse to be realised, or indeed the national productivity gap to begin to be addressed", it said.

The government was called on to "kick-start investment in the growth of the North's economy" in the short term, and provide "greater fiscal autonomy" to the region in the medium to longer term as means of incentivising investment.

UK chancellor Philip Hammond this week said that improving productivity and transport links in northern England will be "right at the top of" the government's agenda ahead of the budget this autumn. However, he did not go as far as to commit to additional money for the Northern Powerhouse during a meeting with regional mayors, the Financial Times reported.

ICE's report said that, in addition to a new Council of the North, a new Northern Infrastructure Board should be established. The Board should work with "local communities, relevant government departments, regulatory and delivery bodies, local government, businesses and academia" to identify the area's infrastructure requirements, and devise a new 'Northern Infrastructure Strategy', it said.

The strategy should "highlight key infrastructure challenges, and economic, environmental and social benefits and provide potential investors with a degree of certainty around future planning and development within the region", the report said.

The North should also look to make more of data to manage infrastructure, it said.

The report said: "Managing regional infrastructure as a system requires effective collaboration, planning and sharing of information to provide a systems resilience as well as individual sector resilience. The infrastructure system fundamentally requires joined up management, long-term planning and a regulatory and policy framework which provides clarity and certainty for all stakeholders through a pan-North approach. Therefore, in drawing up the strategy it is important that the Northern Infrastructure Board works with private utilities, communications and other data owning companies in order to develop an appropriate marketplace for access to and most effective, shareable use of data."

The report further identified opportunities for the North to building on its existing "strong digital economy", which it said includes "specialist technology capability" in connected devices and the internet of things, digital advertising and marketing, e-commerce and social networking.

The report urged the government to further support investment in superfast broadband, and said universal ultrafast broadband coverage, where download speeds exceed 100 Mbps, "would have a transformational impact on the Northern economy, while fundamentally improving quality of life".

"In order to achieve near universal coverage by 2033 there is a major role for government in incentivising further private investment," ICE's report said. "Longstanding challenges to commercial deployment around regulations governing pre-noticing, wayleaves and new build must also be overcome. Any public funding available for deployment should avoid distorting this market, but instead focus on reaching areas not served by commercial operators."

According to the report, more should be done to improve 4G connectivity in the North. The government was also urged to consider the region for testing new 5G technology.

"The North East offers a perfect environment to develop 5G technology," the report said. "It has dense urban areas with high mobile data demand, in close proximity to deeply rural places hard to reach with fixed high speed broadband. It offers a range of transport facilities from main line rail to urban transit systems. Its strong digital economy means that the region is capable of meeting the demand for new applications. Clusters of expertise in the health, automotive and energy sectors, alongside academic support, offer the ability to prove the viability of many use cases."

Earlier this year, Pinsent Masons launched a new study aimed at pinpointing the opportunities and challenges that arise from the increasing convergence between digital technology and physical infrastructure, and how they might be addressed. The results from the study are expected to be published this autumn.

Investors, infrastructure developers and technology providers are encouraged to register their interest in the study.