Industry leaders call for increased collaboration in the North

A panel of industry leaders has said cities across the North of England must come together as “one North” to mirror the cultural strength of London and the South East.

The panel, speaking at the Great Northern Conference that took place last week (3 December), discussed the need for more collaboration between companies and regions across the North of England.

“If you’re from here, you don’t talk about the North, you talk about Liverpool or Leeds or Sunderland or Middlesbrough,” said Jude Kelly, chair of One Creative North.

“We’ve been driven to compete to be noticed and to stand out. We’ve always had to have outstanding features in our own regions and fight for them to be noticed, and that creates a very complex issue around how we collaborate,” Kelly added.

“And who are we trying to be noticed by? Not by each other, but by the South, because that’s where the investors are going.”

Arts Council England’s Rebecca Ball cited transport as a barrier to collaboration in the North.

“If we’re going to have a really powerful creative industry in the North, we need to be able to have a workforce that can get to different places,” Ball said. “A huge amount of our workforce in the creative industry are freelancers, and we need to be able to make sure they can work in Liverpool and Hull and Manchester, in the same way that people can work in London and the South East.”

Meanwhile Creative Industries Policy and Evidence Centre’s head of policy, Bernard Hay, cited universities as a key player for collaboration.

“Creative firms in the North are far more likely than elsewhere to cite proximity to universities as being really important to their growth model,” Hay said. “I think that tells us something about the strength and opportunity in the North of England, but it’s about how we bring universities into our collaboration work.”