Liverpool trouncing Manchester as 'true Northern Powerhouse'

Liverpool is outperforming Manchester and is England’s fastest growing city outside of London over the past 20 years.New analysis from city economics experts ‘City Metric’ has looked at data from the Centre for Cities think tank - and it looks very, very good for Liverpool.The data shows that Liverpool has doubled the size of its economy since 1998 and that prior to the financial crash it was the single fastest growing economy in the whole of the UK.City Metric’s editor John Elledge wrote an article in which he claims it is Liverpool and not Manchester that should be considered as the ‘true Northern Powerhouse’ based on its growth over the past two decades.“By 2016, its economy was worth more than 2.3 times the amount it was worth just 18 years earlier. That’s equivalent to an average annual growth rate of about 4.8 per cent, which is really not to be sniffed at.”A lot has been discussed about re balancing the country’s economy away from London and as City Metric points out, this narrative tends to point naturally to Manchester in most people’s minds as well as the official second city of Birmingham.But as its editor states, this has not been the case and it is Scousers that have seen the most positive change in their city.He writes: “When we talk about re balancing England’s economy away from London, it tends to be Manchester that comes to mind – or, at a push, Birmingham.But the latter turns out to have been one of the slowest expanding city economies since 1998, with an average annual growth rate of just 3%. Manchester fares better, but it’s still only mid-table, at 3.7%.“The true Northern Powerhouse since 1998 has been Liverpool.One thing Mr Elledge says he cannot fully explain is what has driven Liverpool’s remarkable growth and what has gone wrong in other cities such as Birmingham, but one thing he and others now recognise is what an important economic force the city of Liverpool now is.