Finally, the last great economic taboo has been broken: Stephen Timms the business minister has acknowledged that GVA in the provinces will never catch up with that in the capital.

The admission made in a speech to the Fabian Society, a leftish think tank, has led to predictable rumblings from the regeneration establishment in the regions, but the admission was at least ten years overdue.

What he actually said was that it was time to end the “sterile debate” about the north-south divide, pointing out that over the last decade the economies of the English regions had grown much faster than those in other European countries.

London was a special case, he argued: “An extraordinarily successful world city, more comparable with New York and Tokyo than with other British cities.”

He could have been quoting EN, at various times over the past decade, but he was simply giving up the ghost on the pretence that the regions could ever close a GVP gap on a city with such international appeal.

In fact the gap is widening. In the latest figures, London’s total GVA at £196bn (excluding the umbilically connected South East) is greater than that of the North West (£111bn) and Yorkshire and Humberside (£82bn) combined. In 1995 the opposite was true.

Unsurprisingly, the Conservatives have seized on the admission as one of failure, with shadow business spokesman Mark Prisk pointing out that one of the main, if not the main, reasons for creating the regional development agencies was to close the GVA gap.

“Over the last nine years the RDAs have spent £13bn on closing this gap, but it has got wider,” he said.

Timms was having none of it: “We have been obsessed with the north-south divide, giving the impression that the north is in decline. It is not.”

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