West Yorkshire could be said to be undergoing a quiet renaissance. While Manchester and its box office mayor Andy Burnham often grab the media spotlight, God’s Own County has been steadily making its own progress.

In Leeds, the region’s de facto capital, more than 11,000 homes have been built in the past three years, making it the biggest building city authority in the country bar Birmingham – which has a far larger population. Last year Leeds didn’t just out build each of the Manchester authorities. It out built them all by a margin of more than 1,000 homes.…