Bristol should be a city of a million people
One of the easiest ways to grow your economy is to let your most successful cities expand. When cities are successful – we normally measure this in terms of productivity, or the wages of people who live and work there¹ – it’s usually a sign that their local economy works well. They likely have enough productive industries to create local demand, can attract a suitably skilled workforce, and that local services and amenities work well enough to make those workers want to live and spend money there. When places already work, the main thing you need to do is let them expand.
Unfortunately, the UK does not have many successful cities. There is London, of course, and parts of its surrounding area in the South East. There are Edinburgh and Aberdeen in Scotland. And then it starts to get tricky. There are areas of prosperity in the second tier English cities of Manchester, Leeds and maybe Birmingham – but none of them is yet strong enough to lift their whole city region to prosperity. And there is one place that often gets left out of the discussion: Bristol.
Bristol is among the smallest of the English second-tier of “core” cities outside London, home to around 780,000 people². And it is the only one that outperforms the national average in terms of productivity.
Bristol has a strong underlying economy. Its population is highly skilled – because it’s an attractive place for university graduates to live. It has a strong industrial structure, with substantial finance, professional and creative sectors, along with an important high-tech manufacturing sector. And this translates, as it should, into reasonably high productivity and wages. Nowhere near as high as London, or many comparable European cities, but higher than its peers in England.
When you are in the kind of economic state Britain is currently in, you can’t afford to ignore cities like Bristol. It is by no means the most important or most deserving case in the UK, but it should not be ignored. If you can’t get somewhere like Bristol growing, it doesn’t say much about your economic strategy.
Unfortunately, not only does the UK have few economically successful cities, it also actively prevents them from expanding. This is best exemplified by the Green Belt, a policy that makes it very hard for the largest cities in England (and some others, like Oxford and Cambridge) to expand beyond their 1955 boundaries. Now I don’t think the green belt is entirely without merit – density is good, and I’ve driven around enough post-war outer London sprawl to understand why they did it – but it is frankly crazy that it has largely held for 70 years. Many of our cities – not least Bristol – should be bigger, and that they are not is in large part thanks to the green belt. It needs a fundamental rethink.
But expanding successful cities is not as simple as permitting them to do so. You have to keep the cities successful as they expand, and to do that it is critical to build enough infrastructure to support a larger city. That infrastructure comes in many forms – water and sewerage, schools and hospitals – but the most obvious is transport. As cities get bigger, more people tend to work in their centres, and so more people need to be transported in to the same space. You cannot achieve that with cars in a big city, because cars use space so inefficiently. You need public transport, along with active travel (notice how people in London also tend to walk a lot).
Unfortunately, Bristol has almost no mass transit system to speak of. It has a single, winding suburban railway line, and a handful local stops on its mainline services; all are very well-used, despite infrequent services and small trains. It has, like most English cities, what could generously described as “patchy” bus services, and no metro, tram or anything else approaching a mass transit system. Cycling is quite popular in Bristol – which stems more from culture and necessity than any major cycling infrastructure – but the reality is that most people rely on their cars. In a city of over 750,000 people, that doesn’t work. It certainly isn’t going to support a city of a million people.
The lesson, I think, is clear: Bristol should expand, and to do that it needs to build some actual public transport infrastructure as well as more homes. Our goal should be to make it a city of a million people, perhaps more.
Before I get on to how Bristol should expand, it is worth comparing it to some other cities. There are two other cities that are far more often talked up as candidates for expansion: Oxford and Cambridge.
Oxford and Cambridge are also successful cities, although their headline economic data is broadly in line with many other successful cities in the South East. But they have particularly strong universities, and receive a high share of R&D funding, which makes them attractive candidates for expansion. Indeed, government policy for several years has been to build a greatly expanded Ox-Cam arc, which would connect the two cities, expand them and also build a lot of homes in between them, in cities like Milton Keynes.
Now, I think the Ox-Cam arc is broadly a good idea, and I think Oxford, Cambridge and Milton Keynes should expand. I don’t think we should choose between expanding Bristol and the Ox-Cam arc (nor do I think we should choose between this and growing London, Manchester and Leeds). But if I had to say which of these options — Bristol or Ox-Cam — would give government a bigger pay-off over the next 10 years, I would choose Bristol.
Why? Because it is already a significant city, more than twice as big as Oxford (165,000 people) and Cambridge (150,000 people) put together, and it is roughly as productive. And because Bristol is already quite big, we know it works as a city, and it is relatively clear where to expand it. With Ox-Cam, you are aiming to create a multi-polar city, and it is not guaranteed to work as a larger city region. While the politics of Bristol and its surrounding areas is not straightforward, it is far easier to manage than a multi-county arc across a primarily rural area.
It is also important to stress that expanding cities like Bristol is no substitute for trying to improve economic performance in other places. There are many parts of the UK – including too many of its big cities – that do not have strong enough economic engines. It is unwise to simply ignore the growth of such places – many people live there, and do so proudly, and that is not going to change. The focus in these places, though, should be slightly different: more about growing productive industries and upgrading key infrastructure than focusing on expansion. Expanding your successful places and supporting your less successful ones does not need to be an either-or.
How, then, should Bristol go about expanding? It should keep trying to densify within its existing footprint, especially in central areas (Bristol already has a strikingly good record on this in its city centre). But it will also have to expand its footprint, including into the green belt. It should not fill in any existing parks, green spaces or nature reserves — there is plenty of farmland around the city which provides far less amenity value.
But the really important thing is: Bristol needs to rapidly improve its transport and other infrastructure while building a lot more homes. These two aims have a very helpful synergy: building new homes can help to fund a big chunk of the cost of the transport infrastructure.
For example: one of Bristol’s priorities should be to build a tram or similar link to its airport. The route would cross a stretch of fairly mundane countryside, all in the green belt of course. If Bristol builds a few thousand homes close to every tram station — having compulsorily purchased the land or otherwise captured the uplift in land value — it could raise a share of the funding right there. New homes, near to new public transport links that they help to pay for — it should all be win-win.
That said, some taxpayer funding will be needed to build the infrastructure. The best way to do that is to give the local area (and every major city region in the country) the power to raise money from their own taxpayers themselves. The second best way is for the Treasury to make the investment. The Treasury almost certainly won’t see it this way³, but it really ought to be possible to identify how much extra tax revenue investing in Bristol’s growth will produce⁴, and invest accordingly.
There should be a pretty clear bargain here for Bristol’s authorities to make with their voters, and for the UK government to make with Bristol: the city gets a lot bigger and in return gets much better transport links. For this to work, it has to go beyond just “sufficient infrastructure for the new homes” — it must mean making visible transport improvements that all existing residents can see.
One thing we should be more cautious about is the idea that expanding cities like Bristol will lower housing costs. It might do, if the supply of housing increases dramatically. But expanding, successful cities tend to get more successful and more productive, which means more people want to move to them and housing costs do not fall. This does not make it a bad thing – more people living in desirable cities is still a good thing – but it might not solve every problem.
To make all of this work — to offer the grand bargain of more homes and better transport, and actually deliver on it — would require political leadership, both in Bristol and in Westminster. There is little evidence this is currently forthcoming.
The third mayor of the West of England — a combined authority which covers Bristol and two of its neighbouring local authorities — is to be elected this week. The first two mayors largely failed to build consensus among the constituent local authorities on anything, let alone ambitious plans to expand the city region. North Somerset, Bristol’s other neighbouring authority and home to Bristol Airport, isn’t even part of the combined authority. Most of the growth described in this piece would need to happen in neighbouring authorities, and it can only realistically be delivered at the West of England scale. Getting the combined authority working effectively — including via government reforms if necessary — must be a priority.
I don’t think any of the candidates in the West of England mayoral contest are proposing turning Bristol into a city of a million or more people. Many of them are, though, promising to improve public transport and tackle the city’s housing challenges. I wish whoever wins the election the best of luck — and hope they take up the cause of making Bristol a bigger city.
Notes
¹ Some cities — Swindon is my favourite example — have high wages for workers, but lower wages for residents. That’s because they have well paid jobs, but people don’t want to live in the cities, which suggests the city is not entirely successful.
² Using the Primary Urban Area definition in the Centre for Cities data. Measuring city size is difficult, don’t @ me!
³ Although the OBR’s positive view of planning reform gives cause for hope that it might
⁴ This is not even the contentious “will this raise productivity?” type of growth. It is straightforward brute “build more stuff, increase total GDP” growth, which will definitely show up in tax receipts.
