This week​,​ Rob Parsons speaks to an author who's asked the question: How did the North become a place of lost potential and broken dreams? And what can be done to make it one of the most dynamic and forward-looking places in the world once again? Alex Niven is the man behind the book The North Will Rise Again, which covers the colourful adventures of its inhabitants, the expansiveness and optimism that defines Northern culture, A native Northerner himself, having returned to his home city...

This week the Northern Agenda podcast comes from the headquarters of the North East's Chronicle and Journal newspapers in the centre of Newcastle for a special mayoral hustings edition. In a month's time one of the five people speaking to Rob Parsons over the conference room table will be the new elected mayor of the North East. They'll have powers and funding - some £4.2bn over 30 years - to impact the lives of millions of people in a huge patch stretching from Berwick to Barnard...

In the next few months as the impending General Election dominates our politics, The Northern Agenda podcast is going on the road. Across the North of England voters will be going to the polls five years on from the dramatic 2019 election where large swathes of our region broke the habit of decades by switching their allegiance from Labour to the Tories, putting Boris Johnson into Downing Street in the process. If the polls are anything to go by, those so-called 'red wall' seats are now set...

Why is it that bright young people from the North are so much less likely to apply for our two most prestigious universities, Cambridge and Oxford, than their counterparts in the South East and London? It's a question that gets right to the heart of our North-South divide and this week on the podcast Rob Parsons tries to answer it with the help of a Cambridge University academic who got a place there as a working class daughter of a cleaner from Greater Manchester. Director of Admissions at...

This week Rob Parsons finds out about a new museum display celebrating the trailblazing contributions of Muslims living and working in the North of England. Leeds City Museum’s Voices of Asia Gallery is hosting Muslims in the North, which explores the pioneering work of prominent Muslims in fields including commerce, healthcare, law and research. Maria Hussain, lecturer in management and organisations at the University of Leeds Business School, whose research underpinned this display, tells...

This week Rob Parsons speaks to two political best mates who were born just a few miles away from each other in Liverpool and have gone on to be two of the best-known elected figures in our region. Andy Burnham, the mayor of Greater Manchester, and Steve Rotheram, mayor of the Liverpool City Region, have teamed up to write a new book where they share their formative experiences and set out an ambitious ten-point plan to rewire and reimagine our country beyond the Westminster bubble. Their...

This week the focus of Northern politicians is on Leeds, where the Convention of the North will see hundreds of the region's political and business leaders try and work out how to make our region a powerhouse again. Levelling Up Secretary Michael Gove and Labour's Deputy Leader Angela Rayner will be making their pitch about what their parties can do for the North at the two-day Convention of the North conference. But a report out today from the IPPR North think-tank sets out how far there...

This week the Northern Agenda switches focus away from the two main political parties to one that seems to be gathering momentum and hopes to do some real damage to the Conservatives at the next General Election. Reform UK, founded by Nigel Farage as the Brexit Party back in 2018 and renamed in 2020 to campaign against lockdown measures during the Covid pandemic, came third in two Parliamentary by-elections last week and has promised to field a candidate in every single constituency at the...

In big cities like Manchester, Newcastle, Liverpool, and Leeds the last few years have seen huge amounts of regeneration, transforming them beyond recognition.  But what about our region's larger satellite towns and smaller cities, many with a proud tradition and history that stretches back to before the Industrial Revolution? With town centres that went into decline in recent years, thanks in part to the rise of retail parks and online shopping - isn't it about time they were brought up to...

Have you ever wondered how award-winning cartoonist Graeme Bandeira comes up with his ideas for this weekly dose of satire in the Northern Agenda newsletter? There have been some crackers in the last year - Environment Secretary Therese Coffey dancing down Redcar beach surrounded by dead crabs, Nadine Dorries throwing her toys out of the pram after not getting a peerage and Michael Gove and Rishi Sunak stripping down to the bare essentials as they re-enacted the Full Monty in...

For anyone interested in the politics of our region there's really only one story in town this week, that's the long-awaited - and long-delayed - report into the murky goings-on at Teesworks, the flagship regeneration project in the North East. The headline news - at least if you're a Conservative supporter of the scheme - is that it cleared those involved of corruption and illegality. But the 97-page document was not a clean bill of health and in fact had a shopping list as long as your arm...

Is it harder for Northerners to have their voices heard in literature and comedy because of age-old regional biases? That's the question on The Northern Agenda podcast this week with two guests who've explored that thorny topic with academic rigour. Jen Bowden, a journalist and writer from a small pit village called Wingate in County Durham, hosts the Northern Voices podcast but is also working on her PhD looking at the use of Northern dialect in contemporary UK fiction and biases against the...

This week Rob Parsons gets listeners up to speed on what could be the most consequential and interesting election in the first half of this year - unless of course Rishi Sunak is forced to call an early General Election in the next few weeks. On May 2 the North East will go to the polls to choose the region's first ever metro mayor, with a host of new powers devolved from Westminster and a multi-billion pound war chest to spend. Unlike many of the elections for the North's metro mayors it's...

This week Northern Agenda Editor Rob Parsons crosses over the Pennines to witness a big day for the Manchester Evening News - a visit from the man who in the next few months is likely to become this country's next Prime Minister. Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer was out and about in the North West as he leaves Westminster behind and tries to connect with the voters he hopes will hand him the keys to 10 Downing Street. After visiting Alder Hey Children’s Hospital in Liverpool he popped into the...

The Northern Agenda podcast is back after a Christmas break for 2024 - and it seems only right to kick off the year with a look ahead to some of the stories we're going to be talking about in Northern politics in the next 12 months. The impending General Election will surely loom large over political debate in our region. But there are a host of fascinating sub-plots across the North that will make headlines of their own - and potentially play a part in deciding who gets the keys to Number...

Listeners may not have heard of the village of Daresbury, near Warrington in Cheshire, which has a population of just a few hundred people, though it does have a major claim to fame though as the birthplace of the author Lewis Carroll. But just a few hundred metres away from the village is a facility that is already putting the name Daresbury on the map, at least in science and business circles, as the home of Sci-Tech Daresbury, a pioneering science and innovation campus which boasts dozens...

After taking a closer look at what's going on in Sunderland, this week the Northern Agenda podcast heads 130 miles south west over the Northern Pennines to the Lancashire city of Preston. Rob Parsons reports from the This Is The North Convention 2023, organised by the People's Powerhouse, a movement that aims to bring people of the North together to discuss, explore, share and celebrate all the amazing grassroots organisations in the North. The venue for the two-day conference is the Masonic...

What comes into your head when you think of the North East port city of Sunderland? Is it the football team, battling to get back into the Premier League. Or maybe it's car production, with a huge Nissan base now being used to build electric vehicles? For most people, what won't come to mind is the smartest city in the UK, powered by the fastest 5G connections and with passengers travelling in driverless vehicles around the city. Or a place where you can see not only the prestigious BBC...

This week all the attention is on Chancellor Jeremy Hunt as he unveiled his Autumn Statement - or at least the bits that hadn't already been briefed out to the media in advance - in an hour-long speech. In the national media all the talk is about tax cuts - how big are they, when do they start, will they be swallowed up by so-called 'fiscal drag' where millions of people every year lose out by virtue of being moved into a higher tax bracket. But in the podcast this week Rob Parsons looks at...

This week on the podcast Rob Parsons speaks to two fascinating but very different guests. Conservative MP Dehenna Davison has packed a huge amount into her short career so far since being elected in Bishop Auckland in County Durham in 2019 while still in her 20s. Until recently a Levelling Up Minister, this summer she stepped back because of her battle with migraines, but she's got a lot to say about the challenges she faced in government and what levelling up can and can't do for communities...

The North in Numbers - the podcast that gets the human stories behind the statistics - is back, taking over The Northern Agenda again this week. Annie Gouk, a journalist who writes local news stories based on statistics for regional papers up and down the country, looks at the data on dog attacks, speaking to experts to try and unpick what’s behind the increase, as well as what needs to be done to tackle the problem. Official NHS figures show that in the year to March, there were 9,277...

This podcast loves looking at the positive things going on in our region so in this week's episode Rob Parsons hears about a brilliant project being led in the North of England.  Budding writers and journalists from underrepresented backgrounds could be in with a chance of getting their big break as part of a scheme backed by national treasure Michael Sheen and the Daily Mirror. The ‘A Writing Chance’ project aims to give wannabe writers from minority backgrounds a leg-up into the industry,...

There's an election coming in the next year or so, but how much does the public ever get to hear about how the main parties choose their candidates for political office? That's what Rob Parsons has been talking about this week with the broadcaster Michael Crick, who followers of politics over the last 40 years will know is the esteemed broadcaster and journalist who was a founding member of the Channel 4 News Team in 1982 and has served as political editor of Newsnight. He's also a former...

He's been Prime Minister for one year but has Prime Minister Rishi Sunak been good for the North? This week on The Northern Agenda podcast Rob Parsons is joined by the Liverpool Echo's Liam Thorp and Manchester Evening News' Joseph Timan to talk about a year of Sunak, Keir Starmer's challenging week dealing with unrest from Labour's Muslim MPs, and how shutting hotels for asylum seekers might cause more problems in the long term in Greater Manchester. Plus, was hosting the Eurovision Song...

This week Rob Parsons chats to Amy Newton, the founder of the Manchester Tech Festival which brings together leading figures from the North's tech and digital sectors. We all know technology and digital is going to be a bigger and bigger focus for our political leaders in the coming years, but are we doing enough to make sure people from the North's council estates can get the kind of jobs that are cropping up in the shiny sky-scrapers of Manchester city centre? Find out why Amy says the...