“What Manchester does today, the world does tomorrow”: Mayor Andy Burnham's keynote Belfast speech

Keynote speech by the Mayor of Greater Manchester, Andy Burnham, at the Global Investment Summit in Belfast, Thursday 14 November.

“What Manchester does today, the world does tomorrow.” 

So said British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli, it is claimed, when the city – Manchester – was at the peak of its industrial powers in the 19th century. 

It may sound like an impossible boast – and I know what you’re thinking, Manchester is very good at those, and we are quite good – we don’t undersell ourselves. But it’s actually more true than you might think. 

Today, when Bev and I travel around the world promoting our city, we are often proudly informed of the names of cities considered “the Manchester of” different countries, such as Finland, or India, or every country it seems has its Manchester. The second city that’s the outsider to the capital, the industrial city. And many countries proudly talk of their Manchester.  

Indeed, next year, we will go in numbers to the “the Manchester of the East” – Osaka – to celebrate with our friends there as they host World Expo and, with them, tell the story of the Japanese students who came in the 19th century to Manchester, to make drawings of the machinery in its mills and take those drawings back to Japan. 

So that was our story then, but sadly it changed in the second half of the 20th century, as the coal which fired those mills went into decline, and the cotton started to be sent elsewhere. Since then, the back end of the 20th century, Greater Manchester has been busy laying the foundations for a new one in the first quarter of the 21st century. And I think those foundations have now been laid, and I want to tell you today about what comes next.  

Just to say, before I do, something of the philosophy upon which devolution in Greater Manchester has been based. It turns on its head the economic orthodoxy of the second half of the 20th century, particularly the late 20th century.  

The drive from the 1980s onwards to make everyone compete for everything and make everyone bow down to the altar of competition – we believe that left us with fragmented services, sectors and places. 

It might sound counter-intuitive but, in the 21st century, we need to do the opposite: to be competitive, you have to be highly collaborative. 

For a city whose symbol is the worker bee, this feels very natural to us. 

Bev and I can today reveal to you our mission: to make Greater Manchester the most highly networked city-region in the world, with a unique new model of city-region governance uniting all sectors – public, private, academic, voluntary, faith – in one big mission, which is to make us one of the 21st century’s most innovative and inclusive cities to be found anywhere in the world. 

First, something on where are we now.  

For those born after the Second World War – and I think that includes everyone in the audience today – Manchester became a symbol of post-industrial decline, and there you can see on the screen Manchester of the 1990s. The place I left when I graduated from university in 1991.  

I came back home from university to try to find a job, but there was nothing – despite thousands of CVs. I could find a job as an unpaid reporter on the Middleton Guardian, but I couldn’t make that work, obviously.  

So I had to do what the generation of people brought up in the 70s and 80s had to do. To get on in life, I had to head South. And I think Bev tells a similar story about leaving Belfast in the early 2000s.  

Okay: fast forward on from the Manchester of then to the Manchester of now. 

When people visit today, they are stunned by our skyline. And it is hard to believe that that is a real picture, it’s not AI generated. But it is in fact real. And it’s a credit to Bev, her colleagues at the city council and the organization I lead, the Greater Manchester Combined Authority.  

It sends a very simple message: Greater Manchester is back – big time. 

New towers, new arts venues, new music arenas and, who knows, perhaps a new stadium soon for the club of Belfast’s most famous son. But that is work in progress, I might say to the United fans in the audience and in this city, of whom I know there are many to this day. But we’re working on it, I assure you.  

As I said, today people don’t have to do what I did. In fact, we’re seeing the reverse. In the past three years,10,000 Londoners have moved to Greater Manchester. 

Why? Well, young 20-something and 30-something talent can find jobs in our city that put no limit on career ambitions or progression, and they can also find a quality of life that exceeds anything they could afford in the capital.   

Whereas in the early 1990s, just a few hundred people lived in Manchester city centre, it’s now getting close to 100,000.  

We have more new businesses per capita than any region outside London. 

We have been the fastest-growing digital and tech hub in Europe in recent times. 

We are growing faster the UK economy for some time now and that is predicted to continue.  

We are closing the productivity gap with London. 

For somebody born in the North West of England, I can tell you for most of my life, I would not have been able to say those things. But we can say those things now, so I hope you’ll understand the pride.  

Too often we have to come on stages, Bev and I, and say we want this to be better. Well, that’s still true of course, but I think we can hold our shoulders and our heads and say, you know what: what we are doing is working and we’ve done it ourselves. They didn’t do it for us down in Whitehall. We have done this ourselves.  

So more of the stats. The evidence. Because I want you to have the evidence in a setting like this.  

Greater Manchester is home to an £80bn economy which has grown by 50% since 2000, with 4.5% GVA growth in 2022 alone. 

We’ve attracted the most foreign direct investment of any UK region over the past 10 years, and we’ve had more business births per head of population than any UK city outside London. 

We expect £750m R&D investment each year by 2030, 183,000 new jobs by 2038.  

It’s a dramatic turnaround which has been 30 years in the making, and let me say we’ve never lost our heart or our conscience. We’re bringing economic success, but the Manchester way is always industrial and social progress together. And that’s where we’ve got to go now in the next period – to make sure all our residents can feel the benefit of living in a city region like ours.   

People ask what is the secret of Greater Manchester’s success? And it was built by people before Bev and I and in many ways we’re building on the foundations they laid.  

It started with collaboration. And I come back to that word. Let’s get past the pointless competition in my view of the 1980s – everybody has to go in a league table if they’re a school or whatever. I think we’ve moved beyond that in my view. I think we go to a more collaborative, highly networked world in the 21st century.  

The trouble is around the UK, I think there is a parochial tendency for local towns to argue – to stick apart and not work together. 

When the UK Government of the 1980s abolished collective regional structures, like the Greater London Council and the Greater Manchester Council, we could have gone the same. 

But instead, the 10 councils of Greater Manchester, as co-owners of our airport, decided to stick together. And they stood apart in the rest of the country in doing so.  

Over time, they made the case to a London-centric system of national government that we should be allowed the chance to do more for ourselves in the way London was given a devolution arrangement, with more powers handed to the city-region. 

This has allowed us to pioneer our own different bottom-up form of governance where the power is shared. Unlike the GLA in London, which is an extra layer on top of the 30 or so councils of London, the GMCA is the councils. Bev and nine other leaders are the members of the GMCA alongside me and I’m not the person who says it’s got to be this or that. We are eleven. We are a collective. That’s how we work. We are a team. I’m just the captain, let’s say, of that team of eleven. 

And the thing is when you get a whole place approach like that where you’ve got the whole system pulling together, it’s the power of that approach, when the political world unites with the public, the private, the voluntary, the academic; when all of that points in the same direction and pulls in the same direction, that is when something magical starts to happen.  

When I said we are – and are going to be – the most highly networked city-region in the world, I meant it. 

The partnership between our councils has led to new layers of partnership in other sectors. 

We are the only city-region in England to have a Reform Board attended by all public services at the same table, as well as partners in the community and voluntary sector. We take a whole-place approach to everything. 

We are the only city-region where our FE colleges act as a single group rather than as competitors, and the same for our housing providers. 

We also have a voluntary sector that is highly networked, with action networks on homelessness and food security, alongside other issues like digital inclusion. 

And I am not aware – please, somebody correct me if I’m wrong – of any other city in the UK where our six universities have signed a civic partnership agreement, again, working in collaboration rather than in pointless competition, supporting each other to develop their strengths, and a complementary set of strengths that can then benefit the whole of the city-region. 

This brings me to the crucial issue of innovation. 

We have created Innovation GM, which is based on what we call the triple-helix model of partnership between government, business and academia. 

What I would say to colleagues here in Belfast and anywhere looking to tread a similar path to the way we’ve gone – and we wish colleagues here well with the City Deal: the academia at the heart of your system, of your whole approach, is critical, and actually brings academia to life if you like, being in a living laboratory of a city-region like ours, where they can shape our industrial policy, our social policy, where the people who do research can see their research being used by Bev, or myself, or other leaders. 

Devolution of power to the city-region level absolutely can bring our universities into vibrant life and make the young people within them feel like they are agents of change. Who wouldn’t want that? What university in the country or even in the world wouldn't want that?  

That's what we can offer in Greater Manchester, and the great thing is they do it together. They don’t constantly make us choose between them by competing, they do it together, and that is such an important thing. And I know the same partnership exists here between the two big universities. 

And the reason why that’s so important is because the places that succeed are going to have an innovation-led economy in the 21st century, and that’s obviously a big theme of this Global Innovation Summit.  

Innovation does not happen, in my view, when organisations, people and places pointlessly work in competition or isolation. It happens when you have networks of people across businesses big and small, with universities at the centre of those networks. That's when innovation happens. 

It is also enhanced when places, not just internally create stronger partnerships, but between different places with complementary strengths, and it’s why we’re really proud to be here in Belfast having conversations with the city council and others. 

But we’re doing the same in England. 

I was in Cambridge last week with a delegation from Greater Manchester to formalise the first partnership between two English devolved authorities based around R&D and innovation. 

Now why does that partnership work? It is possible sometimes to recognise that somewhere might be better than Manchester. They've been doing the R pretty well for a number of centuries, the R of R&D. But they have a few planning constraints down there, and land is limited. So we can do more of the D for their R.  

But we actually are doing some of the R ourselves, because when i was down in Cambridge last week we went to see the Cambridge Graphene Institute. 

Graphene was isolated in Manchester as you know, but their scientists are working with the team in Manchester to find out the future uses for graphene, and it was brilliant to see that level of collaboration.  

You see what I'm saying about highly networked, highly collaborate systems are what’s going to make the difference, and places that might not normally have thought of working with each other start working with each other, and then good things happen.  

We've all lived in a country that has been highly centralised form a political point of view, where everything has to come from Whitehall and Westminster, where we all have to go on bended knee and bow down and beg and plead for the scraps they’re prepared to throw out for us.  

Imagine if we lived in a different country. A rewired country, where power was much more evenly shared across the regions and nations, and we could all do much more for ourselves without even going through Westminster, where we could work for ourselves and empowered Belfast city-region, or with an elected Provost in Glasgow, or indeed an elected Mayor in Dublin. 

Wouldn't these islands in which we live function in a much more practical way if those places that have actually under-punched their weight because of the way they’ve been treated by Westminster over the years? 

Imagine if they were freed up to be everything they could be, to collaborate more with each other, where we move from constantly seeing everything through a political lens to a place lens, or a practical lens. 

It would feel different, wouldn’t it? It would feel better. I think it would, and that’s why I think we’ve got to work on this together to bring about the change that we need. 

Despite all of this, the transformation in Greater Manchester’s fortunes that I’ve described, and the arrival of new industry to replace the old, we still have a long way to go. 

Levels of poverty in parts of our city-region, as Bev said – particularly child poverty – are amongst the highest in the UK. So there is another side to this, which we readily acknowledge. And there are still wide inequalities between the healthy life expectancy of a man in Manchester and one in the wealthiest parts of West London. 

What evidence is there that what we are doing is changing that grittier reality, that tougher thing that we have to change? Actually it does exist. This comes from The Lancet, October 2022. I’ll just quote a little bit of what it says.

“Greater Manchester has shown better life expectancy than expected after devolution. The benefits of devolution have been apparent in the areas with the highest income deprivation and lowest life expectancy, suggesting a narrowing of inequalities. Improvements were likely to be due to a coordinated devolution across sectors, affecting wider determinants of health and the organization of care services.” 

We’re proud of that, because that’s what I was saying before. Everyone facing in the same direction, everyone pulling in the same direction – that is what actually moves the dial and makes change. But how many places are set up to be able to do that? We need more with that ability to do it. 

Just as our highly collaborative approach to devolution has improved people’s health, so we now want to do the same with education.  

Greater Manchester is the first place in the UK to set itself the exciting mission of transforming technical education and creating an equal alternative to the university route. 

Here is how I describe where Greater Manchester is at right now: the kids growing up in our 10 boroughs can see the skyscrapers from their bedroom windows but not a path to jobs within them. 

Imagine the effect on aspiration of young people in our city-region if we could give them path – a realistic route to working for some of most prestigious employers? 

This is another area where collaboration makes all the difference. We are connecting employers, schools and young people in a new system called the Greater Manchester Baccalaureate, or the MBacc, which will allow everyone to find a path and apply online for high-quality work placements at places like Siemens Energy, or the Bank of New York, BNY Mellon. 

If you do something this, you start speaking to all residents, and you move away from a sense that politics is only working for some – perhaps those on the university route. You reach into places that have been neglected by Westminster, which hasn’t spoken to them. 

When you’re talking about technical education and opportunities for kids who don’t feel the system works for them, and then suddenly they do feel that it works for them, I think that is a way in which you bring people back together who feel very alienated from politics, in the dark and quite difficult times in which we live. And I do think what we’re saying about city-region devolution is an answer to that.  

If you start on the thing that unifies people, I bet whatever the differences in this city, people in both communities have a pride in Belfast. They want to see it improve, and that is common ground, and it's the same in Manchester.  

However people vote there is a really strong pride in Manchester, in Greater Manchester and a real strong desire to see it punch its weight, to challenge London for the jobs, and that exists in every city-region.  

Place unifies us. Place is the one thing that we hold in common in quite a divided world: the place in which we live. And if we base politics around that, rather than the things that divide us – the debates at a national level about independence and breaking away, and whatever we feel about Westminster and Holyrood and Stormont and Cardiff – we focus on things that divide us. We in GM take a place-first rather than a party-first approach. That is about starting from a place of common ground, and then you build from there. And we believe that could bring a lot more benefit to a lot more people if the rest of the UK was enabled to work like that. 

I’m going to say, in conclusion, everybody: thank you for your patience. Thank you for listening to what Bev and I have had to say. We have given the hard sell, but sometimes you do have to go up and sell yourself. 

The North of England wouldn’t have been able to do this five years ago, ten years ago – we wouldn’t have had the confidence maybe to do it, but we do now. And it’s not arrogance, it’s just confidence. And we should have confidence, shouldn’t we? 

Too often people who grow up in our area get to university and they feel impostor syndrome, they don’t feel they can be confident about where we come from, but we can now. For me that’s such a massively empowering thing for me to be able to say to you, that we do feel that now. And I hope our young people feel it too.  

But despite our progress, our productivity is still 35 per cent below that of London. 

This is a far bigger gap than we see between other European capitals and second cities. 

Think about the value we could add to the UK’s global competitiveness if we could close that gap. Just narrowing it to match the difference between Paris and Lyon would add £20bn to the UK economy – if London and Manchester were as close together as Paris and Lyon. It’s a massive prize. 

So, we are doing well, but we have so much more to give. 

In July, the UK elected a new Government with growth as its driving mission. 

We have got real growth, and we can give UK plc so much more, but our message to our own Government is a serious one: it will only happen if you give us the powers, investment, and infrastructure that we need to cope with the consequences of that growth. 

If we haven’t got the homes to offer people moving to our city, or if our transport system becomes even more congested than it already is, then this success story may not last. You have got to invest in it and break Whitehall out of its London-centric ways.  

If you can’t find the money for us, then empower us with new ways of raising it ourselves. 

And everything that I’ve just said that I want for Manchester, I want for Belfast, I want for Liverpool, I want for Newcastle, Sheffield, Birmingham, everywhere. 

This week, Bev and I were at the memorial service for the person you can see on the screen, Sir Howard Bernstein. And we’re not here claiming credit, we recognise that Sir Howard did more than anybody in this country to pioneer a new model of bottom-up devolution. 

As we paid our respects to Sir Howard – Bev and I – and his achievements were listed in front of us, I think we sank a little into our seats at the scale of the expectation now on our shoulders, the challenge of following in his shoes.  

But you know what? We are ready for it. 

We are making Greater Manchester the big growth success story outside of the golden triangle of London, Oxford and Cambridge.  

It will be the most highly networked zero-carbon city in the world by 2038, with better homes, better transport and better jobs for our residents. 

We have the highest ambitions for what we can be in the 21st century, and what you can be too, and we call on all investors, government and private, to back us with that vision. 

Thank you very much indeed for listening. 

Article Published: 14/11/2024 17:34 PM