Pompey’s predicament

ONLY one city in Britain has its own central-government minister. Not London, the capital and economic engine; nor Manchester, the go-ahead centre of the “Northern Powerhouse”. Instead it is Portsmouth, a south-coast port which is neither wildly successful nor especially poor.

“Pompey” jumped up the political agenda in November 2013 when BAE Systems, a defence giant, announced that 940 jobs would go at its shipyard in the city. By mid-2014 the last of its shipbuilding operations in Portsmouth had closed, some to be relocated to Glasgow. Since most of BAE’s work in Britain is in public-procurement deals, the government took much of the flak for the job losses. It responded with a generous package for the shipyard and its workers, including £100m ($140m) of investment by the Ministry of Defence in the city’s naval base. Michael Fallon, a Conservative MP who is now the defence secretary, was appointed the first minister for the city, to “knock heads together” and get the shipyard moving.

This week, Portsmouth’s empty shipyard returned to life when BAE began a new contract to maintain anti-mining ships there. Magma Structures, which makes high-tech hulls, is also due to start work there. But its move to the ship hall has been delayed. “There’s been no re-emergence of shipbuilding,” says Gary Cook of the GMB union. “The PM raised expectations that were never going to be met.”

Others doubt the worth of the Portsmouth minister, a post now held by Mark Francois. “Why have MPs here if you need another minister to lobby on behalf of the city?” asks John Ferrett, a Labour councillor. Some see the post as a gesture designed to win Tory votes: Portsmouth South was won by the Conservatives in last year’s general election after 18 years in the hands of Liberal Democrats; the Tories had taken Portsmouth North from Labour in 2010. The council is Conservative-run, a rarity among Britain’s Labour-leaning cities.

Yet the government’s short-term response to the shipyard redundancies was fairly successful. Of the 940 BAE employees whose jobs disappeared, only 165 were made compulsorily redundant. A little less than one-third were re-employed in other parts of the company, nearly 80% staying in Portsmouth. A “maritime task-force” was swiftly set up to develop a recovery strategy for the industry.

Portsmouth Naval Base has remained busy. Ship maintenance and servicing, if not traditional shipbuilding, remains at the core of the local economy, since the docks are home to much of Britain’s surface fleet. From 2017 the city will be home to two aircraft carriers: HMS Queen Elizabeth and HMS Prince of Wales, the largest ships ever built for the Royal Navy. Smaller investments include £4m for a centre for research into unmanned vessels and £2m to move the Royal Marines Museum to the city’s dockyard.

A more nuanced criticism is that too little has been done to reduce Portsmouth’s dependence on the navy. “The dockyard has been part of the problem in Portsmouth almost for ever,” says Nicholas Phelps, an economic geographer at University College London. Port towns suffer from “a sort of resource curse”, agrees Andrew Carter of the Centre for Cities, a think-tank. The government has shored up the politically important maritime industries at the expense of diversification. Until that changes, Pompey’s prosperity will rise and fall in line with defence spending.