The size of the investment gap between London and the rest of England was made stark by new analysis showing Crossrail alone is earmarked to receive nine times more funding than all the rail projects from the North’s three regions combined.

Figures derived from a research report by IPPR, show Londoners receive £5,203 more per head on capital investment than people in the north-east – a discrepancy sure to reignite a long-running row on whether London’s growth is coming at the detriment of the rest of the UK.



Earlier this week the UK chancellor George Osborne endorsed a £15bn plan to improve infrastructure in five northern cities this week. Although he did not commit to any funding, Osborne said the overall aim was:



To end the imbalance in the UK economy so our success is not wholly dependent on the global city of London, so we have across the north of England individual cities that are better connected, have a better quality of life, and are able to create

New analysis of public infrastructure spending by IPPR North lays bare the gap between how much capital expenditure there is in the capital than the rest of England.

Our additional analysis of the 2013 government infrastructure plan, the IPPR’s data source, showed that the £14.5bn total capital expenditure planned for Crossrail outmatches the £1.6bn earmarked for rail projects in Yorkshire and the Humber, the north-east and the north-west by nine to one.

Other projects in the capital including tube improvements mean that £5,426 will have been spent on each resident of London compared to £223 on those in the north-east region. That’s over 24 times as much.

On the surface of it, residents of the north west seem the most fortunate region outside London, with project spending at £1,248 per head. However, Guardian analysis found that more than half of that total was down to the decommissioning of the Sellafield nuclear plant in Cumbria – necessary, doubtless, but hardly an infrastructure ‘improvement’ as most people would understand it.



Photograph: IPPR

Taking away the costs of that decommissioning in the north-west would reduce the spend per head there to £599 - just over one tenth of what is spent on each person in the capital.

Ed Cox, Director of IPPR North said:



Effective infrastructure is the bedrock of an effective and efficient economy. Transport connections, flood defences and high-speed broadband networks all allow people and goods to move quickly from place to place and for business to flourish. It is widely recognised that the North of England loses out as government spending on infrastructure is continuously skewed towards London.

These figures apply to all projects which receive some level of public funding, whose benefits have been bracketed to apply to one specific region. Projects designed to benefit the entire country, such as the High Speed 2 rail line have not been included.

The government infrastructure plan is not set in stone, but the Treasury describes it as “a strategic and more credible overview of the level of public and private infrastructure investment planned over the rest of this decade and beyond.” The document, published late last year, suggests that transport improvements for the north specifically are a relatively new concern.

One third of planned infrastructure spending in London is the £14.5bn earmarked for Crossrail with line upgrades on the Tube receiving the second most at £8.2bn.

Photograph: Data source: HM Treasury

The biggest rail project currently set to specifically address the needs of those in the north of England is the delivery of a range of products including improvements to the journey time on the Manchester Airport through the Ordsall Chord, which will cost £498.1m (3.4% of the cost of Crossrail).

How much of public infrastructure spending in the north is on rail? It’s 12.6%, while the Sellafield nuclear decommissioning we mentioned earlier makes up over a third of the £12.5bn planned to be spent specifically in the north of England.

Update: in response to demand, we’ve redone the calculations to include the number of commuters in each region. The chart showing this is below

Photograph: Spend on Commuters ONS

More open data



Data journalism and data visualisations from the Guardian

Development and aid data

• Search the world’s global development data with our gateway

Can you do more with this data?

• Contact us at data@theguardian.com

• Follow us on Twitter

• Like us on Facebook

