In April I made the case for a bigger Liverpool City Region (let’s call it Greater Liverpool to avoid confusion). This month, I’ve decided to return to one of my favourite subjects: size.

The City of Liverpool local authority has an area of 112km2. The City of Leeds local authority area is 552 km2 – nearly five times as big.

Does this matter? Yes. In fact, when you consider the fact High Speed 2 is projected to serve the latter and not the former, it seems to matter a very great deal.

The base level for a lot of statistical analysis of city regions is local authority area or borough. These are then sometimes combined with neighbouring boroughs to produce statistics for pseudo-conurbations; the resulting statistics are then often used by central government to allocate resources. (All of the statistics referenced in this article were sourced directly from the Office for National Statistics.)

So the fact Leeds is bigger means it has a massive in-built advantage over other, less generously defined, cities, even if the latter are more contiguously urban. Indeed, the City of Leeds local authority area actually includes not only large rural areas, but also towns which are not physically part of the Leeds contiguous urban area at all.  

So what do the statistics tell us about the cities of Liverpool and Leeds in their current forms?

The easiest way to even things up, to help us to compare like with like, is to add neighbouring boroughs to Liverpool, until it’s the same size as Leeds.

Then we can revise and compare the above numbers again and get a truer picture of the relative performance of each place. 

The City of Liverpool is 112km2; Wirral Metropolitan Borough is 157km2; Knowsley MB is 87km2; St Helens MB is 136km2; Halton is 79km2. That is a total of 571km2.

The combined statistics for this pseudo-Liverpool – which is actually the official Liverpool City Region, minus the Metropolitan Borough of Sefton – are as follows:

The resulting numbers show that this pseudo-Liverpool local authority area is of a similar physical size to the City of Leeds, and has a much better GVA and a much larger population. That suggests that Liverpool deserves at least the same amount of investment and opportunity as Leeds. It goes someway to proving the old adage, popularised by Mark Twain, that: “there are lies, damned lies and statistics”. 

Unfortunately, misleading statistics can have a profoundly negative impact on the life opportunities of enormous numbers of people. So why doesn’t central government try to do something to level the playing field? Perhaps it could treat the area served by the Liverpool Underground, centred on Liverpool city centre, as a single city for statistical purposes – and use that when making its investment decisions.

For example, here is a map with a 20 mile radius circle drawn around Liverpool Town Hall. It looks uncannily like Greater Liverpool as referenced above and, indeed, correlates rather well with map of the Liverpool underground:

This pseudo-Liverpool would be the largest Core Cities local authority area in the UK, with the largest population, making this newly identified pseudo-Liverpool local authority area the UK’s most significant city after the four capital cities. So, bring on the appropriate level of central government largesse and respect, I say – not to mention the avalanche of inward investment.

For completeness, here are the physical sizes of all of the UK Core Cities local authority areas in ascending order of size. The obvious question is: why are the Yorkshire ones so generously allocated?

  • Nottingham – 75km2
  • Bristol – 110 km2
  • Liverpool – 112km2
  • Newcastle – 114km2
  • Manchester – 116km2
  • Cardiff – 142km2
  • Glasgow – 175km2
  • Birmingham – 268km2
    Sheffield – 368km2
  • Leeds – 552km2

Incidentally, as forecast in June, HM Revenue & Customs has now signed a 25 year lease for India Buildings in Liverpool city centre, to be used as one of its 13 national hubs. Now all we need is for many thousands more Civil Service jobs to be moved to the eminently suitable Liverpool city centre, and we will be well on our way to becoming a new London.

Let’s hope Liverpolitan Northern Powerhouse Minister Jake Berry gives them a big nudge in our direction.

Dave Mail has declared himself CityMetric’s Liverpool City Region correspondent. He will be updating us on the brave new world of Liverpool City Region, mostly monthly, in ‘E-mail from Liverpool City Region’.

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