NORTH-WEST minister Beverley Hughes was last night under pressure to visit Liverpool to see what it can offer for relocated civil service jobs.

Think Big Liverpool, the pressure group set up to campaign for Whitehall jobs for Merseyside, has written to the minister to request that she comes to the city.

Last night, the minister said she would “respond positively” to any invitation.

Chris Grayling, the Conservatives’ shadow minister for Liverpool, has already agreed to meet the founders of Think Big.

The campaign was formed in the wake of the proposal to create a “Whitehall of the North” in Manchester, which would house thousands of civil servants.

It comes a day after the minister was accused of deploying “classic but crude Whitehall tactics” when claiming hundreds of civil servant jobs had been created in Liverpool.

The minister wrote to the Daily Post claiming more than 1,650 jobs had been moved to Liverpool, but her department refused to say how many jobs had been lost.

The Daily Post estimates when current known job losses are taken into account, the Liverpool region will only have seen an additional 617 jobs. Labour’s leader in Liverpool, Cllr Joe Anderson, has now also written to Mrs Hughes, whose Stretford and Urmston constituency is in Greater Manchester, warning her she could be accused of bias if she does not meet Think Big.