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When the BBC first announced its intention to move a significant chunk of its operation to Salford in Greater Manchester – the “Out of London” plan, as the then director general Mark Thompson called it in 2004, with a faint “here be dragons” whiff – there were plenty in the organisation who were scornful that it could ever work.
Senior staff would never leave the capital. Star talent wouldn’t dream of travelling. It “didn’t take a brain surgeon”, said the Breakfast presenter and Strictly Come Dancing winner Chris Hollins, to see that the prime minister would never appear in person.
Jeremy Clarkson, then presenting Top Gear, said he would rather quit than relocate to “a small suburb with a Starbucks and a canal with ducks”. “If we ran the show from Salford, we’d be employing people from Salford,” said Clarkson. “People who were born there and thought: ‘Yes, I like this. I see no reason to go anywhere else.’ And in the world of television, that could be a genuine handicap.”
Fifteen years after the BBC’s move north began in earnest, things look rather different at MediaCity, the vibrant, 200-acre media and technology hub in Salford docks that is now home not only to 3,500 BBC staff – leading significant parts of its output including its current World Cup coverage – but 250 other creative and tech businesses whose presence was galvanised by the broadcaster’s move.
Some think enabling people from the north-west to have broadcasting careers closer to home is a good thing. And it may soon be easier, in any event, to get the prime minister on BBC Breakfast’s Salford sofa. Andy Burnham – until recently Manchester’s mayor, as of Monday Britain’s newest PM – has said he wants to move part of his own executive office to Manchester, to create “No 10 North”.
A dedicated department in the city will be charged with overseeing plans to devolve power and resources to cities and regions across the UK, in what, vowed Burnham, would become not an outpost of London, but “the nerve centre of a rewired Britain”.
Will it work? Details so far are sketchy and some, inevitably, have been sceptical (“Sounds performative and seems like a gimmick,” one Labour MP sniffed to PoliticsHome). But the BBC is not the only major organisation to shift significant resources and decision-making power out of London. Channel 4 is now headquartered in Leeds; the largest hub for HMRC, the UK’s tax collecting department, is in Newcastle; the Office for National Statistics (ONS) moved its head office from London to Newport, south Wales in 2007.
Successive governments, meanwhile, have been committed to a long-term plan to move tens of thousands of civil servants out of the capital, notably at a “multi-department government hub” in Darlington, county Durham, that now houses nine departments including a major outpost of the Treasury.
For Alice Webb, who was the chief operating officer overseeing the BBC’s Salford move, later becoming director of BBC North, a number of things were key in making it successful. “Yes, there was a lot of resistance, but there was also a deep, deep conviction, a very strong sense of leadership from the top of the BBC, that this was the right thing to be doing,” she says.
The change had to be big enough to meaningfully shift the broadcaster’s centre of gravity, she says. Rather than moving representatives from a range of departments, the entirety of BBC Children’s, 5 Live, 6 Music and BBC Sport relocated wholesale – the last despite the fact the Olympics were due to be held in London shortly afterwards. “To a lot of people, that was a strange [thing to do]. But the reason why we moved [BBC Sport] from London a year earlier is in truth there just was not the infrastructure in the old Television Centre to support the level of broadcasting that was needed.”
One former BBC exec who enthusiastically relocated from London said the technological step-change made possible by the move – as well as a more flexible way of working once out of the sometimes suffocating institutional culture – made BBC North an exciting place to work at the time. “I don’t think that would have been possible if we hadn’t moved north in such a short time. It might have happened over 10 years, but it wouldn’t have happened effectively over one year,” she says.
Many see the Treasury’s hub in Darlington – already described by the chancellor, Rachel Reeves, as “a No 11 of the North” – as a similar success story, albeit on a much smaller scale; according to one Treasury source, that comes down to the commitment of senior people to base themselves there.
“I think this only works when there is a senior minister behind it,” says the source, who closely observed the campus’s establishment in 2021 under the then chancellor, Rishi Sunak – an enthusiastic backer of the campus who found time to visit frequently. As well as a fifth of all Treasury staff, the second permanent secretary, Beth Russell, is based in Darlington full time, “and having someone at that level sent a message to people who were still ambitious that moving wouldn’t be the nail in the coffin for your career,” says the source.
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Other civil service moves have seen the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government setting up a base in Wolverhampton, and an official second HQ of the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero in Aberdeen.
While only 21% of the civil service is based in London, according to Hannah Keenan, the associate director of the Institute for Government, the proportion in senior roles is closer to two-thirds, making it an ongoing challenge to move real decision-making outwards.
“Civil servants understand where the power is,” she says. “That sounds quite Machiavellian, but it is a sensible response because that’s how decisions get taken. If ministers are in London, senior civil servants will be in London, so other civil servants will be London. If that power base starts to shift and ministers are spending their time elsewhere, that can start to move. I think we’ve seen Darlington artificially create that quite successfully, but it has taken quite a lot of careful planning and effort to do it.”
Not every relocation is an unqualified success: while a broadening of the talent pool is one reason to move, the ONS shift from London to Wales saw 90% of staff resign rather than relocate, leading to a huge loss of institutional expertise and a measurable slump in its output, according to a later review.
Channel 4 has faced criticism that the move to Leeds of its national headquarters – trailed as a “game-changer” when announced in 2019 – did not go far enough, with its most senior executives and presenters remaining in London. In response, the broadcaster said it had undergone “a significant and rapid transformation from a London-centric organisation to a UK-wide one”, with a third of its staff based in Leeds, Manchester, Glasgow and Bristol and a voluntary target to spend its main channel commissioning budget outside the capital: “Our focus has never been simply on relocating roles, but on building meaningful leadership, commissioning, creative and skills capabilities across the UK.”
While there can be direct economic benefits from moving a big department or employer to a new city, according to Anthony Breach, the director of research at the Centre for Cities, it can be just as important symbolically. “It’s a signal to the wider business and policy-making communities that this is a place that is worth investing in, that we see talent and appeal in this place, that it’s worth us sticking our necks out and putting our money in this particular place.”
Webb, who is now the CEO of MediaCity, agrees that successful examples of devolution of power can be key in persuading others to follow. “It can only help to have a very powerful role model to help galvanise what people instinctively know – that making sure that all parts of the country have a part to play in decision-making is the right thing to do.”
