What about a drip-drip Government advertising campaign to promote the value of northern towns to southerners so they might want to go and live there?

The idea that everyone in the South wants to continue living here and could not be persuaded to live in the North is probably untrue.

Shining a light on what northern towns have to offer might work if we look at tourist advertising, for example.

The “ten-pound southerners”, so to speak.

For example, Carlisle, in Cumbria near the border of Scotland, was named as the “happiest city in Britain” a couple of years ago.

Nicholas Dunn-Coleman, The Droveway, Hove