The House Opinion Article | No 10 North could change who runs Britain

4 min read6 min

Someone who attended a private school in London or the South East is 24 times more likely to become a permanent secretary than someone educated at a state school in the North. For a seat in the House of Lords, the gap is 23-fold.

That is not class inequality plus regional inequality. It is what happens when they multiply.

It is also the case for No 10 North: The North does not just need a stronger presence in Whitehall. Britain needs another route into national power.

Sutton Trust research into the regional backgrounds of top government officials reveals just how narrow the existing route remains. London and the South East account for 28 per cent of the population, but half of permanent secretaries, 52 per cent of special advisers and 46 per cent of peers went to school there. Just 17 per cent of permanent secretaries and peers were educated anywhere in northern England.

MPs offer a revealing counterexample. Their regional backgrounds almost mirror the population: 29 per cent were educated in London and the South East, compared with 28 per cent nationally; 24 per cent in the North, compared with 23 per cent. When voters choose, Britain looks like Britain, at least geographically. The distortion is greatest where access to power depends on less visible processes of recruitment, progression and appointment.

That tells us something important. Britain does not lack talent outside London and the South East. Its institutions are failing to find, develop and promote enough of it.

Location acts as a hidden credential. Proximity brings access; access brings relationships and sponsorship; those advantages compound. A government concentrated in one city naturally draws its leaders from those who study, live and work within its orbit.

I attended a state school in County Durham and, like many northerners, my route into national life ran south. Yet our figures classify people by where they went to school, not where they later worked. Northerners have moved to London for generations but remain scarce at the top. Even when talent moves south, it is too often overlooked, while the places it has left lose it anyway.

A privately educated Londoner is 24 times more likely than a state-educated northerner to reach the top of the civil service. If that gap remains in a decade, No 10 North will have changed the state’s address, but not its character

No 10 North could break that cycle. But we have been here before. The Treasury’s Darlington campus and Places for Growth moved thousands of civil service jobs out of London without moving decision-making. Jobs relocated; power stayed put.

To avoid the same fate, No 10 North must become a genuine second centre of government, with responsibility for major priorities, control over budgets and direct access to the Prime Minister. When the next spending review settles regional transport and regeneration funding, will those decisions be made in Manchester, or just announced there? Civil servants should be able to reach the top without moving south, with recruitment extending into local government, business, and civil society.

Getting this right would benefit the whole country. Leaders drawn disproportionately from one region give the state a narrower understanding of the nation it governs. Burnham rightly frames the idea not as a prize for the North, but as a way to make power flow into the Midlands, South West and East of England too. The goal is a state that draws talent from every part of Britain, rather than treating regional background as an implicit signal of who belongs at the top.

No 10 North should complement, not replace, devolution: local leaders still need the authority and resources to shape their places, while national government must distribute its own power more widely.

The initiative should ultimately be judged by where decisions are made and who makes them. Our research offers a benchmark: today, a privately educated Londoner is 24 times more likely than a state-educated northerner to reach the top of the civil service. If that gap remains in a decade, No 10 North will have changed the state’s address, but not its character.

The North does not need a better hearing in Westminster. It needs a greater hand in running Britain.

Nick Harrison is the Chief Executive of the Sutton Trust