THE more we hear of the Treasury jobs move to Darlington, the more we like it.

This newspaper has been writing about the possibility of moving civil servants out of the capital for at least the last 30 years. It doesn’t feel fair that all the state jobs are concentrated in one place, causing all the decisions to be made with that one place uppermost in the decision-makers’ minds.

When Chancellor Rishi Sunak announced the move in his Budget, there was plenty of initial scepticism. Everyone assumed that it would be menial pen-pushers and the real power would remain embedded in London.

But the more Mr Sunak talks about changing the “economic geography”, the more he appoints Treasury high fliers to Darlington, the more he says he doesn’t want people commuting back to London because they need to be immersed in the provinces, the more it sounds as if it is really something.

Darlington is not the only place to benefit from this decamping: Wolverhampton, Birmingham, Leeds, Salford, Cardiff and Preston are also getting displaced civil servants.

The BBC has changed for the better since it moved to Salford; if the metropolitan stranglehold on government can be broken by these changes as real decision-making is devolved to the provinces, the country as a whole will be changed for the better.