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“Doing things differently” – Economic Recovery the Mancunian Way

Manchester City Council launched its Economic Recovery Plan today, with a typically upbeat launch event which shone a light on the close partnership between the public and private sectors that has characterised and underpinned the city’s growth over recent years.

The Plan, entitled ‘Powering Recovery: Manchester’s Recovery and Investment Plan’, has evidently been conceived with the private sector, as has the recently published Greater Manchester vision for recovery ‘Building a Greater Manchester, making a Greater Britain’. Read together they make for a compelling, ambitious, inspirational, and as a consequence, distinctly Mancunian plan for recovery.

The city’s plan is based around three themes: Place, People and Prosperity. At the launch, Sir Richard Leese, the City Council’s Leader, made it clear that people are its heart: it is people who have been suffering and it is people that make a city and will lead its recovery. But to achieve societal gains, Sir Richard emphasised, one needs a highly functioning successful economy, and sustaining the city’s urban regeneration and creating the right environment for investment is fundamental. That interrelationship is plain to see as the plan provides a focus on young people, and the skills and entrepreneurial advantage that the city gets from its demographic. The plan confirms an immediate fund of £36m for people and businesses hard hit during the pandemic, and outlines a longer-term investment strategy which contains a list of physical regeneration projects. Leese also talked about how the plan builds on a unique “Manchesterness” which comes from an ability to understand the inter-relatedness between people, place and prosperity. Elements which are considered in a truly integrated manner in the plan.

The city’s asks of Government – totaling just shy of £800m - are a clear statement on the scale of contribution that Manchester can make towards the levelling up agenda. And in that regard, today’s launch was not an accident of timing, taking place only a matter of hours after the Chancellor announced his Spending Review in Parliament  including a restated commitment to ‘levelling up’. Sir Richard Leese made it quite plain that if the Chancellor wants to achieve levelling up, this plan shows how he can do it.

Those transformative projects are structured across four key investment propositions, which again show strong correlation with the GM Vision:

1. Innovation: seeking to leverage Manchester’s existing strengths to become a ‘superhub’ for science and technology and health innovation research and development.
2. City centre/urban realm: Focused investment to help attract further investment and support more growth through enhanced public spaces and improved environmentally-friendly travel options. Making the city more ‘liveable’ and ‘workable’ are clearly core objectives.
3. Residential retrofit: A £260m scheme to kick-start an ambitious programme to retrofit all 68,000 social homes in the city to make them more energy efficient and dramatically cut carbon emissions.
4. North Manchester regeneration: A health-led approach to regeneration combining the creation of a new health and wellbeing campus centred around a transformed North Manchester General Hospital – a project Turley are delighted to be supporting   -  alongside the 15,000 home Northern Gateway scheme.  

It is apparent that not only is the plan seeking to pick up where the city left off before COVID-19, as one of the fastest growing and most resilient cities in the UK -but also to reimagine itself and accelerate plans for a more liveable and greener city, driving towards its stated objective of being net zero carbon by 2038.

Culture and heritage seem central to Manchester’s recovery plans. Whereas other cities are very  future facing, Manchester’s also looks to build on some existing key strengths, recognising the strength of its cultural DNA, for example, and looking to build on this.

The plan is full of confidence, much like the city to which it is addressed. Manchester is once again conveying passion and determination to succeed despite adversity and working hard to get a share of funding from Government that reflects its ability to drive economic recovery both locally and nationally.  As Sir Richard Leese reiterated at the launch, this is a fully costed plan, that sets out what is needed, and how and it will be delivered. When asked how reliant upon Government support it is, the answer was essentially, it is not ‘if’ the Plan will succeed, but ‘when’ it will. 

Manchester has long aimed high, been bold, valued its distinct culture and played to its strengths. Its plan for recovery is no exception. 

25 November 2020