The real news today isn't about a vacuous B-list actress

Sajid Javid will have his work cut out at the Treasury if he is to use government economic intervention to 'even up' the UK. Believe me, I've done my fair share of Treasury funded regeneration schemes; every significant regeneration scheme needs one not only to jump through microeconomic hoops but to provide stuff unheard of in private investment analysis. No Treasury case is complete without adjusting for Optimism Bias in the prescribed fashion and backing one's construction cost estimates with a Monte Carlo analysis of likely contractor bid values. It's all about additionality - sustainable improvements to the UK economy as a whole, and not just Keynsian helicopter money stimulating temporary demand in the economy. So here's what they'll be looking at

Deadweight
This is what would happen anyway, without government intervention. Not as easy to quantify as it appears because it is dynamic; Brexit will release a wave of pent up foreign direct investment, the certainty of a government with a majority will increase business confidence and even the government's policy strategy to intervene to even-up will affect regional investment. Brexit will also catalyse disinvestment decisions from the global corporates, the world's business gypsies, who even now are eying up Serbia for their next plant. Without having a good grasp of the baseline position - the deadweight - you cannot estimate the additionality that economic intervention creates.

Displacement
Up until now wisdom has been that public money is wasted if it just moves the same economic activity from one place to another. What, for example, are the additional economic benefits to the UK of the BBC moving operations from London to Salford? Here is a typical case of a business move motivated by lower factor costs - land, labour, housing and contractors are all cheaper in Manchester than in London, producing real gains for the BBC. If you can get the taxpayer to pay for the new factory, offices, studios or warehouses and enjoy the commercial benefits, brill. Except for the taxpayer, obv, who gains nothing. Sometimes called pork-barrel intervention; building a new plant in Joe Potato's constituency means a plant closing elsewhere.

This will be a critical consideration at the Treasury. Creating growth in the NE, NW, SW and elsewhere that just moves economic activity out of London and the SE is not evening-up but evening-down. And comes perilously close to gerrymandering.

Substitution
Sort of like displacement but within regions, localities or sectors. It's about exchanging economic factor inputs with no additional economic effects. Buying rice rather than potatoes from your local Sainsbury's alters your dinner menu but leaves your carbohydrate consumption unchanged. Employing unemployed workers who come with a government grant only to release an equivalent number of existing staff through redundancy / early retirement may refresh the firm's workforce (or lose scores of years of accumulated experience, depending how you look at it) but creates no additional economic activity. 

The Treasury do recognise that outcomes may be social and environmental as well as primarily economic, but when it comes down to demonstrating additionality, the costs and benefits must always be quantified economically. This is now what Andy Burnham and his colleagues elsewhere in the regions must now set their minds to do; the political rhetoric of the election is over, the hard graft now begins.

And that is the real news, not the vacuous posturing of a publicity obsessed B-movie actress that seems to dominate the press today.