MANY northern towns and cities are beyond revival and millions of their residents should move to London and the South East instead, a Conservative-leaning think-tank has said.

Policy Exchange said a mass internal migration was the only answer to a decade of failed efforts to concentrate regeneration cash on other parts of the country.

All of the three million new homes planned by the Government should be shared equally between the capital city, Oxford and Cambridge, it concluded in a radical report.

And money currently being pumped into renewal projects and back-to-work schemes should instead be given directly to councils according to local wage levels to spend on regeneration measures.

In conclusions the authors conceded might be viewed as “barmy”, they said coastal cities like Liverpool and Sunderland had “lost much of their raison d’etre” with the decline of shipping and had “little prospect of offering their residents the standard of living to which they aspire”.

It was time to be “realistic about the ability of cities such as Manchester, Leeds and Newcastle to regenerate struggling nearby towns such as Liverpool, Bradford and Sunderland.

”No one is suggesting that residents should be forced to move, but we do argue that they should be told the reality of the position: regeneration, in the sense of convergence, will not happen, because it is not possible,” it concluded.

Restrictions on house-building in the south east should be lifted to lower house prices and stop people on low incomes being “trapped” in less prosperous parts of the country, the authors said.

Land earmarked for industrial use should be released for housing, it said, suggesting that adding a minute’s journey time to the edge of London’s suburbs would make room for a million more people.

The university cities of Oxford and Cambridge were well placed to become the economic power-houses of the 21st century, it argued, like the industrial north more than a century ago.

What do you think of the suggestion? Add your comments below.