Businesses are finally seeing the beauty of the North

I’m biased on this topic as I love the North. I’m proud to come from Yorkshire. I don’t envy those in the South. I’m even choosing to move further north to attend Newcastle University, so hearing that more and more businesses are following suit and choosing to come up here from the south fills me with excitement.

Leeds, in particular, is experiencing a boom. The West Yorkshire city is garnering a reputation for developing highly skilled staff that are in short supply elsewhere in the country. Deep Tech companies are particularly blossoming in Leeds (Deep Tech refers to companies that specialise in the next wave of technological advances, such as Artificial Intelligence, Bio-Tech and robotics).

Channel 4 has also moved its head offices to Leeds, within an old nightclub building, which further shows that the city is redeveloping itself. Leeds also has the financial power to support start-ups and fund innovation, especially in healthcare, but also in more traditional industries, such as finance, legal services, manufacturing, and retail.

So why is the North such a good place for highly skilled workers within the tech sector? I believe this is down to the fantastic universities the North contains. The University of Manchester is a top 5 University for Computer Science, according to The Complete University Guide. Leeds, Sheffield, York and Durham are all in the top 20, and Newcastle sits in thirty-first place, but I’d expect this to rise after the huge investments planned in this area.

The North has incredible potential to become a technological powerhouse, but the Government continues to neglect it. Boris Johnson continually mentions the Northern Powerhouse, yet he reduced HS2 to a highspeed line that stops at Birmingham. Transport links from London to Birmingham, Leeds and Newcastle are already solid, yet links to Sheffield, Manchester, Liverpool and Bradford are awful. It’s a waste of a skilled workforce. There’s so much potential in the North; however, whilst the UK remains London-centric, this potential will never be tapped into.