I will start with a confession: I was the chief secretary to the Treasury who brought together the funding package for London’s £15bn Crossrail 1 project.

Services are not yet running on Crossrail 1, but already the government is dropping heavy hints that it will give the green light to London’s £30bn Crossrail 2. Pretty galling for anyone in the north-east still waiting for a full motorway connection.

Owning up to my part in all this at the Northern Transport Summit this week, I don’t expect to be drowned out by boos. That’s because the north is not anti-London. Far from it. We are proud of our country’s capital. We want it to have a world-leading transport system. But we also want better for our northern cities than clapped-out trains and congested roads.

As things stand, that’s unlikely to happen. The truth is we have a political system that is inherently biased towards London and the devolved nations – and against northern England. Until we all own up to that, nothing will change.

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This imbalance is partly the product of 20 years of devolved power in those places and the stronger political voice they have developed over that time. And they have learned to use it cleverly, with Northern Ireland and London being the big winners since the general election.

But it also goes deeper than that. It is also about the way the civil service and the Treasury work. I can recount two specific incidents from my time there that explain why the north is always at the back of the queue.

The first was when I had just been appointed in 2007 and I received a request for a meeting from a predecessor, Joel Barnett. He was a lovely, quietly spoken man. But on that day he had steel in his voice and came with a blunt message: “Get rid of the Barnett formula, Andy,” citing the formula that he had devised to set public spending in the UK’s four nations.

For those who haven’t spent much time working directly with politicians, it is pretty rare for any of us to ask for something bearing our name to be scrapped. But Joel had made his mind up. “I don’t want to be associated with it any more. It is out of date and inherently unfair to the English regions.”

The second came during preparations for the 2007 spending review, in which Crossrail 1 would be a centrepiece announcement. Conscious that this would mean a lot of extra money for London, which was already getting transport funding for the 2012 Olympics, I asked Treasury officials to give me a list of major transport projects in the English regions that we might announce alongside it. There weren’t any, I was told. When I objected, I was told reluctantly that, at a push, I could announce a review of whether we could afford to refurbish Birmingham New Street.

It was in the process of challenging this that the scales finally fell from my eyes.

Officials took me through the cost-benefit analysis used by the Department for Transport and the Treasury to assess the viability of transport projects. This was almost exclusively an economic test and projects were judged by the economic value they created. In short, projects in parts of the country where the economy was strongest were more likely to score highest. What about areas with higher social need that required better transport to grow their economy? No weighting was given to that, I was told.

That, in a nutshell, explains why the north and other places such as East Anglia and the West Country repeatedly lose out despite intense lobbying by their MPs. It explains why the transport secretary can support a major investment in London just days after scrapping a range of regional electrification schemes. Under the current regime, the more you have, the more you get.

Until this system is fundamentally reset, the north will forever be fighting a losing battle. With Brexit looming, the north can’t afford to wait. More of the same will not work.

This week’s unprecedented gathering of northern political and business leaders sends a clear message: things are changing and the north is getting organised.

Until now, we have struggled to speak with one voice. Not any more. The establishment of a new forum to advocate for the north, which the summit will consider, could help us do that. We should be ready to use the delicate arithmetic of the new parliament to achieve our goals.

If it is to be a straight choice between Crossrail 2 and “Crossrail for the north” in terms of which can go ahead within a reasonable timescale, then it can’t be left as an executive decision of the government. Working with our northern MPs, we should engineer an opportunity for parliament to decide.

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If the government can fund both simultaneously, then fine. But I doubt there are two pots of £30bn lying around the Treasury. One will have to be prioritised. If that is the case, then I would hope that parliament would conclude that it is now the turn of the north to come to the front of the queue.

In this way, I believe this week’s summit could mark a real change in the politics of our country. Having been promised a northern powerhouse, and found ourselves still waiting for any real evidence of it, the penny has dropped. Unless, like London and the devolved nations, we pool our political influence and show a real willingness to use it, then we will be waiting for ever for a powerhouse that will never come.

I hope that the government will listen to our reasonable calls and work with us to set out a long-term plan for major investment in the north. If it did, it would begin to provide a response to what voters in many parts of the country were saying during last year’s referendum.

The sentiment underlying the vote was a feeling that our political system, Westminster and Brussels combined, has worked better for some areas than it has for others. Strip away the arguments about the EU and it is clear that they are right. For the good of the country, it is time to rebalance it.