‘Growth in every postcode’ requires unleashing Cambridge to power the East
This commentary by Paul Swinney is from his original LinkedIn post, reproduced with the author's permission.
I was quoted in the FT’s big read on ‘growth in every postcode’.
The piece centred in on the differences between Cambridge and Peterborough to show the challenges that achieving this slogan are likely to face. Peterborough has grown in recent years - Centre for Cities shows it to be a top performer for jobs created in the last decade.
But, unlike near neighbour Cambridge, it has struggled to create high-skilled jobs. This is because the city has struggled to attract and grow frontier industries such as life sciences and advanced manufacturing. Adjusting for population, Cambridge has around three times as many of these types of companies as Peterborough, with the latter trailing the national average.
And this happens across almost all frontier sectors. The chart below shows for which sectors the difference between the two cities is greatest. The maps below come from The Data City’s platform, and show where these companies are in each city. In Peterborough they cluster on business parks by the A1 to the south west. The biggest concentration in Cambridge is on the science parks to the north (which sit just outside the local authority boundary, but that’s a whole other story).
What this tells us is that proximity is very important for these types of companies. In principle they could set up anywhere between Cambridge and Peterborough. But they don’t. They want to be close to one another. And at least some of them will want to be close to the University of Cambridge too.
Given this, we should be dubious about the likely impact of the OxCam corridor. If proximity is important, why would companies want to be in a no-man’s-land between Oxford and Cambridge? We should instead be expanding Cambridge.
And we should adjust what we mean by growth in every postcode too. Access to growing prosperity would be more appropriate.
So for Peterborough, there is room for it to do better. Places like Aldershot and Milton Keynes show what is possible. But part of its growth in every postcode story will also hang on the expansion of Cambridge. Cambridge is a very innovative place. But it is small, and so the amount of prosperity it generates for people living in postcodes outside of the city is small too. That needs to change if it is to play its part in achieving the PM’s slogan.
EPH Comment
Paul’s piece unpacks the rhetoric of ‘growth in every postcode’. Not every place can achieve the same kind or pace of growth. Cambridge, with its distinctive and difficult-to-replicate assets, is likely to retain its productivity advantage. The regional challenge is to widen access to the opportunities that such centres generate while developing the strengths of other places.
The piece also revisits the arguments about proximity and density. Agglomeration helps explain why businesses, workers and investment cluster in cities, where scale and concentration support larger labour markets, specialist suppliers and the exchange of ideas.
But density alone does not guarantee access to these benefits. Proximity involves both the co-location of businesses and knowledge institutions, which enables spillovers, and the ease with which people can reach jobs. Connectivity therefore matters alongside concentration.
Transport investment is essential to extending these opportunities and easing the pressures associated with agglomeration: overheated housing markets, congestion and pollution. Seen in this light, the OxCam Arc, the Norwich–Cambridge Tech Corridor and the Innovation Corridor are best understood as frameworks for connecting centres of growth and coordinating housing, transport and employment development. Their value lies in how effectively they link places with complementary strengths.
The East of England has no single dominant metropolitan centre. Even as Cambridge expands, the region’s growth potential will depend on stronger connections between its varied towns, cities and centres of innovation. A regional strategy should build on this polycentric geography, coordinating investment so that more places - and more people - can contribute to and benefit from growth.
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