Sir Richard Leese served as a councillor in Manchester City Council for 38 years from 1984 to 2022. He served as deputy leader of the Council from 1990, and leader from 1996 until 2021. He was knighted in 2006 for services to local government and now chairs the NHS Greater Manchester Integrated Care Board.
This interview was conducted on 21 October 2021.
Q: Could you tell us about your role in growth and regional policy over the past few decades?
I have served over the last two and a half decades as leader of Manchester City Council. Pre-Covid, and probably post-Covid, it’s the fastest growing, economically, city in the country. Until March last year, I was economic lead for Greater Manchester. I was involved with Tony Blair’s government, then Gordon Brown’s government, in discussions about economic devolution. It is often forgotten that we signed our first devolution deal in 2009 with the Labour government. That never came to pass because of the 2010 general election, but the one thing that survived was the Combined Authorities. The order was laid under the Labour government and signed off under the Coalition government.
The 2009 devolution deal then became the basis of what Greg Clark did in the Coalition government, around the City Deals. He couldn’t get agreement from his colleagues to do it at scale. He was trying to chip away around that.
I was an RDA [Regional Development Agency] board member for a number of years and was one of three representatives on the Northern Way steering group for its entire life. The Northern Way steering group, apart from anything else, is what became George Osborne’s Northern Powerhouse. This started life in the transport compact of the Northern Way. That emerged through a paper we did about transport, One North. I’ve had a local role, a sub-regional role, a regional role, and a transregional role.
In that transregional role, you can almost blame me for Rail North and Transport for the North. I led the work around the Northern Independent Economic Review that set a robust plan for what would now be called Levelling Up. We needed to do a range of stuff in the North of England if we were going to level up.
I’ve been an LEP [Local Enterprise Partnership] board member since LEPs were created. I was the acting chair of the Manchester Growth Company, now The Growth Company, and was on its board until last year. I have had quite heavy involvement in sub-regional economic development.
Q: The rise of Manchester and its economic success is a huge achievement. What’s been the biggest frustration over that period?
The biggest frustration is effectively the lack of continuity in national government. It’s not just change of party control. Peter Smith and I met Douglas Alexander during the Labour Party conference. I remember we had a conversation with him – this is when he was transport secretary – ‘We meet the transport secretary like this every year. We’ve never met the same one twice.’ You’re always starting again, over and over. We first proposed the devolution deal for Greater Manchester in about 2006. Myself, Peter Smith, Susan Williams – who is now Baroness Williams and was then the Tory leader of Trafford – and the Liberal Democrat leader of Oldham went to see David Miliband, who was the Communities minister. Six months later, it had changed. Every time you have to start again. That’s probably the biggest frustration.
Then, there’s the inability in general of government to think long term. There were exceptions to that. For example, the New Deal for Communities and Urban Regeneration Companies were both 10-year plans. It’s very rare for government to think over and fund those sorts of timescales. It is due to the short-termism of national government, and the complete lack of any joining-up between the different departments within the government. It was true when Labour were in government. It’s even more true now. It only appears to get any better when you have a strong Chancellor who grabs it – an absolutely essential requirement – supported by Prime Minister. Otherwise there is no corporate working in central government at all, that I can see.
Q: How important is the Prime Minister’s view, and whether they really support what the Chancellor’s trying to do?
You need a Prime Minister who supports and a Chancellor who drives. I think that’s where the relationship lies. If I go back to that 2009 devolution deal. Gordon was Prime Minister. Gordon supported Alistair, particularly because Alistair thought RDAs were a complete waste of space and wanted to drive different arrangements. You have that combination working together. Tony Blair was a centralist, basically.
Q: Did Whitehall speak with one voice?
Certainly not a homogenous voice. If I think of areas where we made progress, it tended to come down to relationships with individual ministers who were both willing and able to deliver things. Off the top of my head, I have two examples. Patrick McLaughlin, the transport secretary, was there for about six years. Every time civil servants said ‘No’, we could go and see Patrick and we’d come to some sort of agreement. He was accessible and didn’t just tick the boxes.
Before that was Andrew Adonis as schools minister. When we were doing Building Schools for the Future, civil servants would quite regularly tell us ‘You can’t do that. The minister won’t agree to that.’ We’d go and see Andrew who said that, frankly, they were making it up. Andrew’s approach was: ‘Are the sponsors happy with this?’ As long as we could say yes to that, then that was it. In both cases, it was quite focused with ministers that were very hands-on at driving things. After the Manchester Independent Economic Review, which was 2008, a lot of our interaction was with Treasury civil servants. The Treasury civil servants at that time were positive, and wanted to work with us. Treasury civil servants now are absolutely dreadful.
Q: Did that change with the Chancellor?
For this particular lot, it’s probably the Chief Secretary, with very rigid views about how things should be done. There is something to do with the Chancellor as well – this particular Chancellor [Rishi Sunak] does not appear to have an agenda. They’ve become a source of resistance rather than what I described earlier about chancellors who drive things. Money makes things happen.
The year I became leader was when Michael Heseltine was deputy Prime Minister. Michael, ministerially, was a joy to work with, always accessible and understood cities. Having somebody who understands cities is rare as well. It all varies. At different times, we’ve had good relationships with civil servants in departments. We’ve had good relationships with ministers in departments. Sometimes we’ve even had both. Although, basically, DWP and Education have been consistently bad, and difficult to engage with.
Q: Was that true of both ministers and civil servants in Education?
Generally speaking, yes. There has been crossover with the Department of Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy. This is on lack of engagement on skills and apprenticeships, and skills has moved from one to the other on several occasions over the years. We did do a devolution deal with Health, although that was done with NHS England, not with the department. We’ve been able to engage with Health.
Q: What is it about education in our country, which has made it different from transport or other areas?
I don’t know. I have to say that the Learning Skills Council that we did have in Greater Manchester used to have a good working relationship with us. Of course, you will get variation across the country in agencies of that sort. Some perform well, and some didn’t. We have a good relationship with the Learning Skills Council, here.
Q: Did that mean that you could shape your own targets locally or your budgets to different priorities? Or was that all centrally mandated?
There was discretion locally, but one of the things we wanted to do was merge our two colleges to create one super college. The Learning Skills Council wanted to do that. They were both corporations, so we needed the consent of their boards and one of the boards didn’t want to consent. The director of our Learning Skills Council said, ‘We can’t make your merge, but we don’t have to give you any money either.’ This forced them to come to the table, which was the right thing and it worked. There are people who are prepared to do those sorts of things.
But going back to your question, I think at the Department of Work and Pensions, it appears to be largely civil servants who drive and have consistently driven the agenda. It is partly to do with changes of minister: even if you make a little bit of progress, as soon as the new minister comes in, the civil servants try to take it back again. We’ve had that with Education as well. There is a departmental culture around that which is very much about command and control. If you go back even further than a couple of decades, if you look at the origins of state education in this country, it was all about being able to control people, not to educate people. There is still an element of that, that’s built in, somewhere.
Q: Did anyone push local government to take responsibility for structural change, and for where there was good and bad performance?
No, they didn’t, and there is an issue there. I can remember having meetings with leaders, LEP chairs from across the North of England when we were doing the Northern Independent Economic Review. I remember a number of leaders kept saying, ‘We need government to tell us what we can do.’ And I said, ‘No, we need to tell government what it is we want to do.’ But I think that’s an indication of long periods of re-centralisation.
Quite large chunks of local government feel powerless. One of the differences, certainly between Manchester and a lot of other places, is that we’re always ready to try and take things on. We did not feel powerless. There is an attitude problem in local government, a lack of willingness to put the heads above the parapet. It’s ‘seeking permission’, all the time. The problem with seeking permission is that people occasionally say no. If you don’t bother seeking it in the first place, then they must find out you’re doing it and tell you, ‘You can’t.’
When we were talking about health devolution back in 2015, we had all the discussions about the poisoned chalice. ‘Are we taking this on to get blamed for everything?’ My argument was always, ‘If there are difficult decisions to be made about health in Greater Manchester, who do you want to be making those decisions? Do you want us to be making them, or do you want people in Whitehall to be making those decisions?’ I was absolutely clear that I wanted us to be making those decisions, not necessarily in every case on our own, but certainly we needed to be part of that decision-making.
Q: You’ve seen the variety of different regional, transregional, sub-regional structures that have existed. What’s your analysis of the development of those structures over time, and what has worked?
The 2008 sub-national review was an important paper. There were also papers produced at the same time looking at issues such as conglomeration, which I thought were quite powerful. The key message of the sub-national review is that – in terms of economic development – you have to do the right things at the right spatial level, and the right spatial level is different for different things. That’s fairly fundamental.
I think that did lead to a fundamental change in the way the Labour government looked at things. I argued for many years, going right back to 1999, that the basic building block of economic development is the functional economic unit. They’re difficult as a political concept, because they have fuzzy boundaries and they overlap, so you always have to have approximation. Here we take Greater Manchester as an approximation to the functional economic units. The real functional economic unit is a bit bigger than Greater Manchester. But the politics work better by keeping it within Greater Manchester. There are some things – for example, the transport compact of the Northern Way, certainly a rapid East-West transport option – that clearly must be done on a transregional basis. Some things need to be done on a bigger footprint. There are some things that need to be done nationally as well. It’s about getting the right footprint. But the sub-regional, the functional economic unit is the basic building block.
I started first looking at this because when I was involved on some of the executive committee of Eurocities, I quite regularly used to get asked to go and speak in places like Lille, and the big French cities. In that wonderful French way, those cities had devolution to metros, although they weren’t consulted on it, the French government just decided they were going to have it, whether they wanted it or not. I started looking at places, especially the Lille metro area and the arrangements there.
Effectively they were all the communes within a defined geographic area. If you take somewhere like, Lyon, it was 30-odd communes within that and Lyon itself was about 70 percent of the population. You’ve got communes that are half a dozen people. In Lille, when you got pretty a split between the Front National and the Social Democrats, who ended up with the president of Lille metro being the independent mayor of a commune of about 100 people, but with no base whatsoever. But what it did was, it re-modelled the French metros into what became combined authorities.
The most significant thing about that is that between the local and sub-regional, it is effectively one tier. The sub-regional tier is ‘owned’ by the localities. That’s still the case, even within a larger Mayoral combined authority. This is fundamentally different to the London model, which is a two-tier system, and two-tiers that are very disconnected. We don’t have that level of disconnect. That’s probably why, as other places have developed metropolitan governance in this country, they’ve all imitated the Manchester example rather than the London example.
For the first decade of this century, I regularly met with cities from all over the world, that are all grappling with the metropolitan governance issue. The OECD had proposals about a Chicago Tri-State metropolitan area, which I have to say would have been a nightmare. Within that area, there’s about 1000 different elected authorities in the three states, of which two were Democrat and one was Republican. The chances of it ever happening were probably about nil. Places all over the world were grappling with the issue of metropolitan governance.
Q: What do you think of the London Assembly?
The Greater London Assembly is a complete waste of space, to be honest. I think it serves no real purpose whatsoever, as far as I can see. It has no power, and it doesn’t seem to have much influence either. Successive mayors have all ignored it freely and Sadiq’s no different to his predecessors.
The Mayor has a lot of power over not very much. I think that’s also a difference with the Greater Manchester model. The Mayor of Greater Manchester does not have a lot of executive power. However, they ex-officio chair the combined authority, so they are, effectively, elected leader of the combined authority. That’s a direct relationship with the ten leaders of the districts, and that is a very different working relationship. I’ve talked to London councils. I’ve talked to the Labour group on London councils about combination, about how you get integration with health. Governance arrangements in London just make that virtually impossible to do, certainly in the way that we’ve been able to do it.
Q: How would you feel about all of this if you were the leader of Burnley or Blackburn?
At different times I have talked to leaders and chief executives in both Blackburn and Burnley. Blackburn is a unitary authority now, but they very clearly saw Darwin’s future as being a dormitory for Manchester. They understood. Their biggest issue is that there is a single-track railway line, that they wanted to be a double track railway line. Burnley, similarly, for a long time that there’s something called the Todmorden Curve. It was a gap in the railway and they wanted the Todmorden Curve restored so they could get direct trains into Manchester. If you asked Hull for their big ask, it would have been improved rail links to Manchester Airport, similarly for Sheffield as well. It goes beyond the Lancashire boundaries around that.
We drew maps, and the functional economic area of Manchester overlaps with Liverpool, Leeds, and Sheffield. We overlap in three directions. In the surrounding places, there were four unitaries created. We allowed them all to become associate members of the Association of Greater Manchester Authorities – just so they got had friends somewhere, people they could come and talk to.
The solution is unitary authorities. That two-tier system is ridiculous and has become even more ridiculous. Fixing the boundaries where unitaries should go, and you could have a county unitary that will approximate the functional economic areas. For Lancashire, because it’s a two-tier structure, if it’s not going to become a unitary, it ought to develop its own combined authority. They have been on the verge of doing it on several occasions. But there’s always somebody who pulls out at the last minute.
Q: What would make sense would be to go unitary and then make sure that everybody was in a combined authority?
Yeah, I think county unitaries for more rural areas could be a better solution than combination.
Q: But the point is, you wouldn’t have places outside of reformed governance.
No. One last thing on boundaries. It’s an example of where it probably requires something that’s slightly more top down. If you go across to Yorkshire, to Hull, the most sensible economic arrangements are East Riding, Hull and North East Lincolnshire. That’s both sides of the Humber.
Q: Are there parts of the RDAs which you think worked?
Some RDAs worked better than others, and I was on the board for a long time. I don’t think the North West Development Agency was a particularly good example. It was very much operated on a deficit model, not an opportunity model, and you have to do both. They got the balance completely wrong. The task they were set by Gordon was not that ambitious because it was to reduce the rate at which regions were falling behind London. They certainly didn’t succeed in doing so. In terms of addressing that, as we did in the Manchester Economic Review, we identified where our best growth opportunities are, and worked to capitalise on those. The RDA tended to ask where is everything is at its worst, and to concentrate on that. They were never going to maximise the growth opportunities there.
Given the geography of the North West, from Stoke on Trent up to Carlisle, the RDA was too interfering when what it should have been was a strategic body facilitating. They wanted to micromanage all the time.
Q: Did you see examples of that being done in a way which was more effective than the North West RDA?
I think Yorkshire Forward was more effective. One North East basically did Newcastle and nowhere else, so it was less successful.
Q: What were you trying to achieve?
Let me start with Manchester. This goes back to the late 1980s, when we were rate capped. Our starting point was that we wanted to tackle poverty. We wanted to tackle deprivation. The biggest single causes were worklessness, low skill levels and low paid work. Our mantra at the time was jobs, jobs, jobs, and to a large extent, it’s still jobs, jobs, jobs, because we are still, in reality, recovering. People point to Manchester as this wonderful success. We are still recovering from the 1980s recession. We haven’t recovered from it yet. We’re on a journey, but we haven’t recovered from it.
That applies across the whole of the North of England. Just as we lost most of our manufacturing industry almost overnight, so did most of the North of England as well. It is the same journey. It is about how we create jobs. The requirements for creating jobs have changed over the period.
Now, the biggest single indicator for economic growth is quality of life. Skilled people have lots of choices where they can live and work. They will choose to live in places that they think give them a good quality of life. Skills, infrastructure, innovation are still important, but quality of life is probably now top of the hierarchy.
The plans that have emerged for the North of England certainly started off very strongly on transport and getting better links across the regions, and particularly linking people into the main economic nodes. That’s a key element. Trying to work with the key research universities to improve the innovation ecology of the North of England was a second element of that. Skills should be a sub-regional element rather than a regional element.
The other thing that we started to do but didn’t really get that far, because of the rivalries between the three RDAs, was around the image part of this. If I’m selling Manchester to the world, I’ll cite four national parks within a maximum of two hours travel range. None of them are in Greater Manchester, but they are part of the offer there. The North of England, in its topography, mountains, moors, coasts actually has physical attributes that no other part of the UK has. It is coupled with historic cities like York and Chester, with what are once again thriving city centres in its major cities.
I’ve been quoted as saying, you can’t base economic policy on a brand of tea. This was my view of the One Yorkshire. It was bonkers, in my view. Bonkers. When that was being pushed, it’s when Osborne was Chancellor. Osborne asked me my opinion of that and said, ‘You have to go with it.’ Especially if what you’re interested in is growth, the drivers of growth means a whole city, and its sub-region. But of course, the Tory MPs in North Yorkshire just won’t agree to that so it never happened. Or well it’s happened now, but it’s taken a long time.
Q: Did you find others had the same ‘ask for forgiveness’ attitude in local government?
We made a bit of progress now. We’re always very clear that whilst Greater Manchester was out on its own, which it was in 2011, we were always vulnerable and we couldn’t keep making it [on our own]. Health was a special case. We were treated as a special case. There is a limit to how much any government will do that. It is also about how sustainable it is, because if you’re a special case, it’s very easy to take it away.
I spent a lot of time going and talking to local authority leaders and talking about the combined authorities. On one occasion myself and Howard Bernstein went to talk to the leaders and from all the districts and the chief executives in West Yorkshire. There was somebody who was in the room, who reported back that when Howard and I left it was like the adults have left the room. It was very frustrating.
Q: How do you think about London and how we should think about London and its relationship to other cities?
London is, apart from the central government, the primary economic driver of the UK economy. That’s one of the reasons I have been a very active supporter of High Speed 2, because improved connectivity generally leads to improved economic performance, on both ends. This links to the relationship between cities and towns, over the past decade or so. The fastest growing towns and cities have been smaller towns and cities on the periphery of London. They were outgrowing London most of the time. There is a lesson to be learned from that.
Q: How should we think about cities and their relationship with the towns around?
Michael Parkinson in Liverpool did work on this. It demonstrates very clearly that there isn’t a successful region anywhere in Europe that hasn’t got a successful city in it. We did some work in Greater Manchester about economic inclusivity, and the University of Manchester did work in all ten districts. The most inclusive district, according to their criteria, was Trafford, which is also the district that has the highest rate of commuters. It is also the district that has the highest rate of startups. The biggest single indicator of a town’s success is its proximity to its nearest city. By proximity we’re talking about travel time, not necessarily distance. If you look in Greater Manchester now, there are an awful lot of towns where a large part of the working age population work in Manchester. A lot of them then bring that back to where they live. They support a nighttime economy there, restaurants, cafes, which makes it a more attractive place to live. So then more people go and live there.
There are some districts – Stockport, for example – which are proactively engineering those changes. It can be done, although for some of our towns like Rochdale and Oldham, to create a housing market in their town centres you will need an awful lot of patient capital to do that. It would not be sustainable by the market in the short term. There has either got to be soft loans or something to make that work. The city is where people go for the night out. It’s where the universities are. It’s where the major transport links are. It’s where the big offices of the financial and professional and other services are. It has the potential to service that much, much wider area.
If you take Rochdale, they have got ‘alright’ train links to Manchester. If you were looking at growing that town, then focus on the area in between the town centre and the railway station, which are a little way apart and that’s where you put your development activity. For the towns to succeed, housing is absolutely essential. Now, one of the reasons Manchester is so successful now is we’ve got 25,000-30,000 people living in the city centre, which sustained a lot of that.
For Rochdale, it’s building on and improving their transport links, particularly with Manchester. It is investing in housing to develop a town centre, housing model, skills and education. There is absolutely no doubt about that. Although again for skilled people it’s got to be somewhere that they want to live. Those are probably 15- to 20-year strategies. That is doable and there’s evidence of where it’s been done. Manchester needs their labour force, they need Manchester’s jobs. What you need to do is to make sure that those are very effectively connected.
When companies are moving to to Manchester, and this is true of going anywhere, they want to know how many people with Level Four and above qualifications live within one hour’s travel distance. Most fundamental question that they will ask. That is why Manchester does relatively well. We’ve got more than anywhere else. Apart from London.
Q: Have you, compared to other places, been better at keeping graduates?
We’ve got by far the highest retention rate of graduates in the country, and we are a net importer of graduates as well. That changed in the first decade of this millenium, when urban living moved from being a niche activity for people for a couple of years after they graduated, to a lifestyle people wanted.
The Labour Party conferences started coming, there’s another factor. That’s the first time that there’s anywhere with enough hotel beds outside of seaside towns. In terms of urban policy – where the most powerful lobby in this country is a rural lobby – some of my colleagues like Lisa Nandy are in real danger of dividing the urban lobby, which has traditionally always been very weak. Basically, there should not be a ‘towns versus city’ debate. They are genuinely dependent on each other if you’re going to have success.
I got frustrated with big, core cities from about 2014 on, when the majority of them had formed metropolitan authorities. I kept pointing out that going right back to 1999 the first major policy paper that core cities talked about was about city regions, the hinterland. That had been our aim. Having largely achieved that, the fact that they were still being protective about themselves rather than having a proper engagement with their surrounding area, just drove me bonkers really.
Q: How much does regeneration depend on transport, how much of it on skills, and how much on housing? To what extent are cities’ problems the legacy of manufacturing decline?
Putting proportions on them will be quite difficult. I think London-centric policy has been a problem, consistently. Housing policy that puts public money into what is already an overheated housing market – all it’s going to do is overheat it even more. Housing policy has been pretty fundamentally wrong. Michael Gove wants to change that. We’ll see.
Clearly, Treasury Green Book methodology assesses transport schemes in a way that transport schemes in the most successful areas are always going to score better than those in areas that need levelling up. That’s still the case now. That’s not changed. It is one of the reasons we’re under invested in the North. When you do sums on that sort of basis, they don’t look very good.
If government policies of allocating research money is on excellence, that always assumed it had to go to the Golden Triangle because that’s where excellence was. There was no notion that you could create excellence somewhere else. It became fixed. Allowing so called independent advisors, who all happen to be professors at Oxford, Cambridge or London, to make the decisions, always meant the money was going to go to Oxford, Cambridge or London. There has been a model of government, and particularly a model of economic assessment, which is historic rather than strategic and forward-looking. It has been a fundamental flaw. An example, even though it’s about the only good thing I might say about Margaret Thatcher, was around the Jubilee line. The BCA of that was 0.97, less than one. Margaret Thatcher said, ‘Well, we’re going to do it anyway.’ I have to say that Margaret Thatcher proved to be right.
ENDS