Atificial Intelligence is often used as a shorthand for the future of our economy. But to say we want a future shaped by AI says little about what that future looks like. AI is a tool, a way of generating answers to questions from massive quantities of data. An AI-powered future is a future that uses data to achieve things we care about. What those things are is up to us.
Beyond Whitehall, there is little serious grappling with what this future should look like for places like Wigan. As the Member of Parliament for Makerfield and the leader of Wigan Council, we have been thinking carefully about how AI can be harnessed to give working people in our area a better future. While it’s a work-in-progress, we wanted to share it, because it will matter for leaders across the country in the coming years.
The government’s approach is centred around AI Growth Zones. These are effectively energy-intensive data centres, which are important for the future of AI in the UK but do not, in themselves, generate good jobs or productivity growth in local areas. Data processing is not like coal mining: there is no relationship between the people who do it and the physical place the processing happens. We must be clear that AI will not herald a return of place-based industrial capitalism.
To actually harness AI to generate growth and employment in a local area, we must be much more granular and specific. It starts by looking at the real-world businesses that generate data and could use it better to drive efficiencies and productivity. In Wigan, we have UK-wide strengths in sports, food manufacturing and other process manufacturing that is generally high-volume and low-margin. For instance, Heinz has one of the largest food factories in Europe in Wigan, producing three million tins of beans a day, and the largest wet-wipe factory in Europe is in the Makerfield constituency. Local business Uncle Joe’s Mint Balls has grown from selling sweets at a Wigan market stall in 1898 to being exported across the world today. It is a particular favourite in Japan.
These factories work on fine margins, producing hundreds of thousands of cheap outputs. On a daily basis, they generate millions of datapoints. Unlocking that data, using it to make improvements in the process of packaging, or bringing products to market faster and more cheaply, can be transformative to the productivity and profitability of these companies, and in turn, the wages and work of local people.
Or take sport. Wigan Warriors, which is owned by the New Statesman’s owner, Mike Danson, has been one of the best rugby league teams in the world for most of the game’s history, and this season, Wigan Athletic and Wigan Warriors women’s teams have been almost undefeated. Each game generates hundreds of datapoints about each player, team tactics, fan attendance and spending, and a host of other pieces of information that clubs can use to professionalise and secure their finances. Wigan can lead the way in this kind of analysis.
AI is a tool. How you decide to use that tool, and how an area develops distinctive expertise in improving and deploying AI, will depend on that area’s existing strengths. For us in Wigan, it’s not about building cutting-edge large language models or generative AI, it is about potential for global businesses building and doing things in the physical world to use data and AI to drive up productivity and boost our economy.
Local authorities can make a real difference here. They must collect, store and process data much more effectively to understand how best to serve their populations and inform better decisions. To make preventative healthcare a reality, target financial assistance or educational programmes, or get people back to work, Wigan is working to improve how it gathers and processes data.
A more data-driven council can be a more community-led council, more tailored to the needs of specific, hyper-local places and people. This approach has seen success in London, where the London Office for Technology and Innovation has pooled data from a variety of boroughs to give better data sets, to intervene on issues from community health to tackling widespread mould problems.
This summer, we will launch Scale Space North – an AI and digital innovation hub working with Wigan Council’s digital partner, Agilisys. Wigan’s Civic Centre has been repurposed to act as a catalyst for local start-ups and new business propositions. Such partnerships and digital innovation are vital for the public sector to radically transform to meet community needs and to create skills and jobs for the future.
Wigan powered Britain’s industrial revolution. Mining, for example, was hard, physical work, but it gave people jobs, skills and, importantly, purpose. Wigan helped Britain win wars, become the world’s wealthiest nation and to protect our country from threats.
Despite its promise, the internet revolution has provided little for northern towns like Wigan. Our public realm has been battered, while too many people, from kids to pensioners, have retreated into the addictive haze of social media and fragmented digital worlds.
People are angry, and they are right to be. Levelling up did not provide what our towns really need: a huge boost of productivity, capital investment and real attention to the potentials and the problems of specific places, from the ground up. The job of people like us is to ensure the AI and data revolution actually benefits working people. Often, this won’t always be shiny or glamorous, it will be about understanding the distinctive strengths of an area, and how they can be built on to generate, store and analyse data better, then integrate data-driven tools across businesses and public organisations.
AI is neither a silver bullet nor a destructive disaster. It is a tool that should be part of the future we choose to build. It is we, the people, who give meaning to family, work and communities. The shape of our AI-powered future is up to us.
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