As the Mayor of Greater Manchester, Andy Burnham, attempts to re-enter national politics, he’s talked a lot about “Manchesterism” as an approach that underlies the relative economic success of Greater Manchester in recent years, and has argued for the re-industrialization of those parts of the country that lost much of their industry in the 1980’s and 90’s. What is behind these arguments? I can’t claim any direct knowledge of Burnham’s plans, but I do have some insight into the development of the Greater Manchester Combined Authority’s economic strategy, which may offer some clues.
Greater Manchester’s economic revival is real; the city region has had the fastest growing economy in the UK since 2019. JP Spencer’s excellent summary breaks this down; the recovery is broad-based, in the sense that every sector has seen GVA growth greater than the UK average, but the biggest increases are in ICT and professional, scientific and technical activities.
Nonetheless, this economic success isn’t evenly spread across the conurbation; according to the latest ONS figures, while central Manchester now has a productivity 6.9% higher than the UK average, North East GM lags the UK average by 20.8%. So far, GM’s economic success still looks like a city centre phenomenon based on high value services and agglomeration economics.
There’s wide agreement that central Manchester’s success owes a great deal to Sir Richard Leese and Sir Howard Bernstein, for many years the Leader and Chief Executive of Manchester City Council. This incarnation of Manchesterism was based on a combination of highly permissive planning policy, with close partnership between the council and private sector real estate developers, and its results can be seen in the changed skyline of central Manchester, and a substantial increase in city centre residents.
Burnham is always careful to give credit to Leese and Bernstein for their role in Manchester’s revival. If Manchesterism is anything, it is Richard Leese’s doctrine that there’s no point talking about wealth redistribution if there’s no wealth to distribute, so economic growth has to come first, and I think Burnham has internalised this.
But the creation of the metro Mayor, and Burnham’s first election to that role in 2017, has changed the dynamics in one important way. The electorate consists of the population of the whole of Greater Manchester, not just the city centre, and Burnham’s strong mandate has come from majorities in all ten boroughs of GM.
This means that Burnham’s political priorities have moved towards trying to spread the economic success of central Manchester to the outlying boroughs. North East Greater Manchester – Rochdale, Bury and Oldham – have some of the weakest regional economies in England, with very low productivity and a whole host of other social issues; in the Northwest of GM, Burnham’s home turf of Wigan and Leigh is a little stronger, but not much.
The biggest success so far for developing the boroughs outside central Manchester has come in Stockport, where in 2019 a Mayoral Development Corporation took responsibility for city centre development. MDCs combine planning responsibilities with some strong powers, including compulsory purchase, and in Stockport this allowed the consolidation of a complex pattern of land ownership, often over brownfield land, to create a new transport hub, new housing, and attractive town centre amenities.
Rochdale, Bury and Oldham are weaker economies than are to be found in South Greater Manchester, less well connected to the centre, so the problems are different. In the spirit of Richard Leese and his insistence on the need to generate wealth, what Rochdale, Bury and Oldham need is more high productivity private sector businesses. Knowledge intensive business services work for central Manchester, but that’s a city centre, agglomeration story, hence the need to focus on high value manufacturing.
In my view it’s important to be very clear about why one wants to support manufacturing, as I wrote in an earlier blogpost, Good reasons and bad reasons for supporting manufacturing. Primarily it should be because it has high productivity – one supports manufacturing not for jobs, but for the value it brings, and for the activity in business services that it supports. Increasingly, national resilience has become an important driver too.
It seems to me that if you want to grow the high value manufacturing sector there are three possible routes, all of which should reinforce each other as a cluster develops. Firstly, one should support the existing business base, both through helping them access innovation and skills, and through helping them find the right premises, with the right infrastructure, to expand into. Despite its overall weak economy, there are good manufacturing firms in Rochdale, Oldham and Bury. One can go into a Victorian weaving shed, and find a bunch of looms weaving advanced materials like Dyneema and carbon fibre into high value technical textiles; one of the UK’s few remaining semiconductor fabs is located in Oldham.
Secondly, it will be important to attract international firms operating at the technological frontier. Inward investment is an important feature of GM’s economic strategy, but in my view this needs to be targeted, with priority given to firms whose activities will complement and add to the existing manufacturing ecosystem.
Thirdly, one can support spin-outs and start-ups to scale and grow in the UK, helping them site their nascent manufacturing operations in the UK, rather than seeing them disappear to Germany or Taiwan or California, as so often happens now.
What can this part of GM offer? What it does have is land for development. This was the motivation behind the “Atom Valley” Mayoral Development Zone, linking three major development sites, the largest of which is a substantial green field area big enough for a gigafactory. I was an inaugural board member of the Atom Valley Mayoral Development Zone, and contributed to developing its strategy under the chairmanship of the economist Paul Ormerod. Burnham was strongly committed to that project and has stayed closely personally involved.
How does one actually re-industrialise? My perspective on this is shaped by my time at Sheffield, where I saw the success of the University of Sheffield’s Advanced Manufacturing Research Centre (AMRC) in rejuvenating the manufacturing economies of Sheffield and Rotherham. The measure of that success is significant new inward investment in high value sectors, with AMRC, under the visionary leadership of Keith Ridgway, having a catalytic role. The AMRC experience was very much in our minds in planning the strategy for Atom Valley – helped by the fact that the major landowner in Atom Valley is Haworth Estates, who also owned the Rotherham Advance Manufacturing Park. Economic incentives matter, of course, so the argument that we have to use to convince them is that building a high value manufacturing cluster will bring them a bigger land value uplift than the default option of a logistics/ warehousing park.
So this is the plan for Atom Valley. It’s main selling point is that it is a very large and attractive development site, big enough for a gigafactory, with a commitment from local government to allow construction, supporting that with grid connections, road access, and building all the associated necessary infrastructure (including new housing and transport links). The University of Manchester is supporting that by running an innovation centre, focused on the translational research needed to support industry, in Rochdale. The local FE colleges will be major anchors of the developing the skills system that a more productive manufacturing economy will need; the 9 GM FE colleges are increasingly collaborating through the GM Colleges group, particularly in the area of innovation, through the Further Education Innovation Programme; this is an aspect that is a particular priority for Burnham.
Manufacturing isn’t the only priority for GM; there has been a regional industrial strategy which has been sustained with considerably more consistency than at national level. Besides the advanced materials and manufacturing that are the priority for Atom Valley, the other areas are life sciences, digital and AI, low carbon technologies, and professional and business services. There are geographical aspects here, too; the centre of gravity for life sciences lies towards the south of the conurbation, towards the still important pharmaceutical cluster in Cheshire, while digital and AI probably benefits more from agglomeration effects in the centre of Manchester and Salford. Within GM, other areas of geographical focus will emerge, for example the environs of Old Trafford, and Ashton Moss in Tameside.
Manchesterism starts with an insistence on the importance of economic growth as a driver of widely shared prosperity. From that starting point, I think it’s fair to say that the economic development aspects of Manchesterism have been evolving, from the pure city centre agglomeration story of Bernstein and Leese, to one that takes a more deliberate approach to generating value and prosperity across the whole conurbation, reflecting Burnham’s political priorities. This is all difficult, it’s early days, and I’m not going to claim that success is guaranteed, but there has been genuine sustained commitment to this programme from the GM Combined Authority. If Burnham is successful in his ambitions to return to Westminster, perhaps we’ll see how this might translate to the national stage.