Sir Howard Bernstein was Chief Executive of Manchester City Council from 1998 to 2017.
This interview was conducted on 20 January 2022
Q: Could you please explain your role in regional growth policy over the past few decades?
I was the Chief Executive of Manchester City Council for just over 20 years. I was also the head of the Paid Service for the Greater Manchester Combined Authority. For 12 months, I was the effective accounting officer for the devolution of Health and Social Care within Greater Manchester.
I’ve got a background in regeneration and transforming cities. In that context, I’ve had a number of relationships over the years with different government departments in trying to move the dial. The regeneration work was over a period of 35, 40 years. I was the Deputy Chief Executive for Manchester, working in regeneration. I led all the regeneration programs. In 1996 in the aftermath of the terrorist bomb, I led the task force which Michael Heseltine established to oversee the renewal of the city centre.
My whole approach has been about place leadership. Not organisational leadership – that’s different. How do we – working with different stakeholders – create the overarching vision for transforming a place, in this case Manchester. We ask what that means for engagement with government, to get government and business leaders behind that strategy for change. We pioneered, I think, what a city vision actually looks like: especially a vision for a city that was struggling to adapt to globalised, market forces. Crucially, we pioneered what that meant for developing a toolkit for interventions in the marketplace to shape places which people want to live and work.
Q: What have been the the key successes, and key frustrations, in policy since the 1970s?
We’ve never ‘got’ what was required for place leadership. In the Thatcher years local democracy was consistently eroded. We went through a phase where we set up Metropolitan Counties which were next to useless. Place leadership and empowerment – in the context of democratically accountable institutions, exercising influence over the long-term success of their place – has not been prioritised and given the emphasis in policy required.
I think that the first time we saw any material change was when Alistair Darling started to introduce the concept of City Deals. The requirement to start to change the way in which mature institutions could start to engage government to enable a degree of co-design around national programs to be brought forward. You’ve got this whole problem, which the system is still grappling with, about what you mean by ‘devolution’.
I always put it to [George] Osborne: ‘actually, this is about co-design. This is about how civic institutions working in their own places could work with national government and ensure there is the proper and full alignment around all the key programs and activities to do with transformation, both the place and people’. I still think that that debate is being played out.
The notion that you will see huge amounts of functional and fiscal devolution transferred from the centre to local places is something I’m passionate about. I don’t think you actually will make that level of progress, unless we start to address what we mean by co-design.
I had a conversation with a minister privately a couple of weeks ago: “We need to get more money from the Treasury”. I argued that if we are going to level up, if we are going to boost economic performance, narrow disparities anywhere, wherever they exist, it’s about how mainstream programs, such as skills and education, are aligned with the particular circumstances and positioning of different places.
Q: What did you think about place leadership and co-design in the period from 1979-97?
All of it was top-down. Unless they had occasional irritants such as me knocking on the door and saying, ‘why don’t we do this?’, or Richard [Leese, then-leader of Manchester City Council] and a few other local leaders. The 1970s was not characterised by any emphasis around the importance of cities. There was no clear economic rationale for why we should be creating more engines of growth outside London.
Q: How about the debate about selective assistance, assisted area status, and in the 1980s, enterprise zones? Those were a kind of place-based policy making?
It was all stuff that was parachuted in, wasn’t it? There was never really an analysis about what different places needed or required. There was never a customised approach to how you strengthen the place and leadership capabilities of different places. There was never an understanding.
You know, it’s only when we got to the Coalition Government that there was even a recognition that local government actually had a role in driving economic performance and economic development. There was a period where I believe local government was marginalised, in that whole process. As a result, place leadership capability in many parts of the country was significantly eroded.
Q: Did that change with Michael Heseltine in the 1990s?
Michael, was very, very passionate about regeneration, but it was always on his terms. Development corporations were right in terms of driving economic performance, but many of those changes could easily have been delivered by high quality local government if they were able to have the resourcing to actually deliver them. The most successful urban development corporations that Michael established were ones where there was the closest partnership, between those agencies and the local council. The one in Central Manchester, you know, we had a choice. Some Labour local authorities said, ‘we’re not having these things, they’re anti-democratic’. We said, ‘well, actually, this could be a way of us accelerating the delivery of many of our key projects and many of our initiatives. We’ll work with them and we’ll influence it, intellectually we’ll control it’.
Q: When did that place based economic regeneration leadership start for you in Manchester?
In the mid-1980s. Graham [Stringer, then leader of Manchester City Council] said, ‘there’s two ways we can go here: play the national game, the zero-sum game, and wait for things to be handed to us; or take the initiative ourselves, give ourselves credibility in exercising that place to leadership role, galvanise the private sector. Come up with a strong vision about what all of this means’.
Planning, inevitably, was a lever. But one of the much less talked about initiatives was overseen by Lord Epsom, called City Pride. There’s no money attached to it, but we saw that as the mechanism for actually legitimising our place leadership role. We saw that as the mechanism for collaborating with our partners outside Manchester, particularly those partners in the core of the conurbation like Salford and Trafford, even the development corporations. We saw it as the opportunity to strengthen our relationships with our business leaders. We were the only one. I’m very interested in developing an analysis about City Pride. We picked that up and said ‘this is what we think you mean by it. Here is our City Pride Prospectus’. He was blown away by it, and he came two days later to launch it. That was the start of creating not just a common narrative of bold vision, but it was also the way that we started to agree shared priorities, not just locally but nationally as well.
Q: How about the Blair-Brown period, where a lot of local government policy focus was on public service delivery?
For the first time, we started to see public services and the reform of public services, which is a critical component of transformation of place. That was good. The Regional Development Agencies, at the start, were broadly welcomed by us. But very quickly they became institutionalised, emasculated by bureaucracy. They interpreted their brief, by and large, as not really investing in places to achieve their full economic potential. It was more of a focus on problem places, and how you spend money, without there being a proper relationship between project definition and place transformation. The concepts of place planning, in my view, were still sadly lacking.
RDAs were not city-focused enough. ‘Well, now you’re, you’re doing okay. You’re getting your act together. You’re moving your city forward.’
Politically, in Greater Manchester, leaders knew that there was greater strength by working together within a distinct economic geography. The Association of Greater Manchester Authorities leaders met every month, for years and years. We started to see the evidence of where the next phases of change was going to come, from the centre: the City Deal approach. We started to see that this is the big opportunity, and, at that stage, we helped shape some of that.
One of the key elements of that was, ‘well, we now need to re-examine the effectiveness of our prioritisation as Greater Manchester in order to get ourselves in the best possible positions; to take advantage of where we thought the national policies would develop’. We then started to spend a lot more time on the economic vision for Greater Manchester, rather than just the delivery of Greater Manchester-wide services.
Q: Is the current arrangement this City Deal strategy with an elected mayor laid over it? How did local political leaders respond?
Richard became much clearer about it, like we all did, when Cameron was pushing for city-mayors. Everywhere we went, we were told ‘we don’t need another one of you, Richard, we already got one. What we actually need is stronger leadership, political leadership, at the Greater Manchester level’. That’s when we all started to work it out.
When George [Osborne] asked me to go down and see him, he said, ‘look, I’m ready for the next big phase. I’ve been waiting for everybody to come up with their ideas, and you’re still the only person and the only local authority that keeps coming to me and saying, “why aren’t we doing this? Why aren’t we doing that?” I’m ready to make that step, and so is the Prime Minister’. The point I made before we embarked on that journey was, ‘Well, you need to recognise that the price for having a mayor is going to be our version of the mayor, because what we don’t want is the London model [two tier]. This has to be a more integrated approach, but we can work on that’. The most important requirement was a significant constitutional settlement.
Q: Why did you think the ‘combined authority’ model was appropriate? What were you taking from the London experience?
I had some experience of working in the in the London mayoral model system. Tony [Blair] appointed me to go on the Olympic Delivery Association board. I saw first-hand, working with London boroughs, how they were not talking to the mayor, and the mayor not actually agreeing with this, that and the other. It was a recipe for chaos.
We felt, in a defined economic geography like Greater Manchester, that there was a better model. We already had 10 leaders who, for the most part, shared the same priorities, met every month, and developed a mature approach to decision making. What we wanted to do was to recognise that what effectively we’re talking about was another leader who was a first amongst equals. That was the essential political settlement we reached in Manchester.
Q: You rejected a new oversight tier, a London Assembly equivalent?
We didn’t want any of that. We wanted an integrated, seamless approach. That inevitably changed the dynamics of what government was thinking about, because they traditionally had only thought about the London mayoral model or equivalents. But we thought that was the right approach for Greater Manchester. Based on the conversations that Richard had in particular with his counterparts in other core cities, I think there was an acceptance that they had to deal with this type of request, and that was probably the way forward as well.
Q: Was it important that the ‘first among equals’ was elected?
That was absolutely fundamental. In our view, there would be no democratic legitimacy, otherwise. I can remember, a conversation with the late Peter Smith. Great man. Great man. He led AGMA [the Association of Greater Manchester Authorities] for nearly 30 years. I can remember being in his office, updating him on the progress of the devolution conversations. He said, ‘we know what’s coming up, and, Richard, I don’t know about you, but I’m the leader of Wigan and I work full time here. How, if we get all of these additional functional responsibilities and access to more resources, can one of us – me, you, anyone – take all of this on in addition to our day jobs leading our local authorities?’ And the answer was, ‘you can’t. You can’t’. That was the very simple rationalisation for a mayoral model. We just haven’t got the physical capability to do this properly.
Q: The counter-argument would be that moving by consensus – across ten authorities – risks bringing you down to the lowest common denominator?
That’s when you come back to: what are we setting these things up for? What are your priorities? What are our programmes?
We put as much effort into the development of a 3-4 year plan as we did in the overall governance arrangements. It wasn’t about setting something up, somehow, and then going away and working out, ‘what do we do? How do we do it? Who gets what?’ We had a clear sense of priorities around towns, city centres, transport, housing. I’m not saying it was developed to minute detail, but we had a very clear assessment of what we were going to do and what we needed to do over a 5-to-10 year period. And that’s where the concept of place planning comes into it.
Q: Why would the Manchester model work everywhere? The West Midlands, by contrast, has a less defined economic geography and less equality of size between its constituent authorities?
That’s true, but they overcame a lot of their problems by spending a lot of time, in the latter stages, on their governance model. They spent a lot of time working through the principles. ‘What are our priorities? How’re we going to make trade-offs?’ Quite a lot of the operational characteristics, the voting behaviours, the way in which these models were going to be operationalised, they faced a lot of the tension. Quite a lot of the tension, but not all of it, was taken out of the system, by focusing on operational decision making.
There are places that said ‘let’s set one of these things up because we’ve got to and then we’ll work out what we’re going to do afterwards’. Cambridge[shire and Peterborough] is a very good example of why it doesn’t work. They’ve never, ever had a conversation about what they wanted to do.
Q: You accept Manchester had a more tightly defined geography and sense of identity than these other places?
Yes, I think that’s fair. But that’s not to say there weren’t tensions, but they’re all mature enough politically to understand that the demise of the county, the Metropolitan County [in 1985/6] gave them a problem which, unless they cooperated, would mean many key services would just disappear.
Q: Why do you think Greater Manchester drew that conclusion if other regions did not?
I think we embraced it as an opportunity to support our place leadership roles. Other places felt it was being done to them. There is a fundamental difference in how you approach those opportunities as a result. We did it as a mechanism for driving our place leadership capability. How do we work together to make Greater Manchester better? We used to say in Manchester that ‘we do not need central government to grow our economy. We need to work with Salford and Trafford to do that’. We’ve done that for years. We all need to reform public services to drive the transformation we need. And other Greater Manchester cities needed us for access to jobs.
Q: What about the outlying areas – Burnley, Blackburn – that are in Greater Manchester’s economic footprint but outside of those political relationships?
I’m not sure Richard would have told you this, but I can well remember the leader of Calderdale Council and the Chief Executive coming to see Richard and me, and saying, ‘well, look, we’ve had a political conversation and we’d like to join Greater Manchester. We think you’re our future. We look increasingly towards you, than we do our other colleagues [in West Yorkshire]. Richard, are you up for that?’ Richard said, ‘in principle, of course we’re up for that. We’re always looking to extend our collaborative approaches; we work very closely with Yorkshire’ – which is hard, because some of the people you have to work with did not necessarily have a, shall we say, a mature view of the world – ‘in principle, yes, we’d love to’. A week later, we got a call from the leader: ‘well, Richard, I’ve now been suspended’.
We can’t pursue this agenda at all. It was impossible to have those mature conversations. From our point of view, we did try subsequently to have different forms of alliances, but they were positively discouraged by Peter Box, the leader of Leeds at the time, who saw us as the archenemy.
Q: Given these political rivalries, how do we make decentralisation comprehensive?
I think there are two or three things you need to do.
First, we need to address what we mean by incentivising place leadership. It is not incentivised properly at the moment. In conversation I’ve had with [Michael] Gove, and with his predecessor, over a period of months, I argue they should specify ‘this is your legitimate role as local authorities’. The really good ones should be able to exercise influence, if not control over Local Enterprise Partnerships for example.
Secondly, by incentivising place leadership, you start to develop a toolkit for place leadership, which is about access to more resources and influence with government about the way in which your place planning should be delivered.
Thirdly, for those places who are able to go faster and deeper, then move it on: allow them to do so.
Q: Should government compel membership one way or the other? How do we solve the Blackburn challenge?
East Lancashire is a very good example. We used to have regular meetings with East Lancashire chief executives, Burnley, Blackburn. We collaborated around the Burnley railway link because that was of vital importance to them, and it was important to us. We wanted to expand our labour market, as we do. But when you start talking to politicians, their priorities did not meet ours.
Q: So should we accept that there are places which will do things better than other places?
I think you’ve got to accept that. Places are at different stages of development, different stages of achievement. At the end of the day, everyone should have access to the same incentives in order to make themselves better.
Q: Some argue RDAs could overcome this by requiring cooperation in return for funding?
If they would have done that, I would have agreed with you. I didn’t see much evidence of that. If they would have done that, I would agree with that. That was never their mandate, they were never judged on that type of approach.
Q: How do you build place leadership in towns?
It’s a conversation you would have with somebody like Lisa Nandy. She would ask, ;What has the combined authority done for Wigan Town Centre?’ I said, “Well, nothing! Because if Wigan Council doesn’t prioritise the town centre, why would I as the head of the paid service in Greater Manchester do that for you?” That’s the point here. If you look at many of these towns, which are run down and neglected and have been disproportionately impacted by the pandemic, where is the evidence that the role and functionality of town centres is embedded in the place planning capability of the local authority? And the answer in many cases, is that there is no evidence at all.
Q: And for the other cities? Were other city-regions riding Greater Manchester’s coattails?
I had a very close relationship with Tom [Riordan, Leeds City Council chief executive] and his predecessors. We’re very close. They were trying to do all the stuff we were doing, with perhaps slightly different levels of achievement. They did not recognise, in my opinion, the significance of the wider sub regional economy.
Peter [Box, Leeds City Council leader] used to come over to Manchester for conversations, with Richard. I think Peter ultimately became a convert to the sub-regional model. I think the problem with Peter was he just wanted to control it. And ultimately, that is a political failure. If you’ve got the right systems and the right processes and incentives in place, then political collaboration ultimately determines the success or not of these structures and these programs.
Q: What policy levers should be held at a sub-regional level in the ‘right’ system?
I think the first question really is, does government have a place [spatial] plan? Do you know what you want to do? What are your priorities? Are they evidenced? Are they relevant? Are they? What is the relationship between your place plan and our national priorities as a country?
Do we talk about that? No, we don’t. We all have this mumbo jumbo coming down from the centre. We’ve been talking about levelling up in different forms for years. The difference now is we’re still not clear about what levelling up actually means in terms of the finer grain of policy prioritisation. If it doesn’t link to education, it doesn’t link to schools, if it doesn’t link to skills, it can’t be levelling up as we know it.
Q: Could you talk us through the process that led to health and social care devolution? Why that rather than education, for instance?
Well, we tried education. It was, that was ruled out by the head of the Number 10 policy team. We went for health and social care not because we wanted to fix hospitals – which obviously need fixing – but because we wanted to create a platform for reforming public services. Our vision was, that if we can move towards an integrated commissioning model, which starts with health, social care, around neighbourhoods and localities, we could then develop the capability to our children’s services and add other services over time. It was simply about how we drive the reform of public service. And in our view, it was the only way we would get into that debate in a way that people like Osborne and others would sign up to.
It was a moment in time. I said that’s what we wanted to do. Osborne said, ‘I’ll give you the ability to write up a plan and tell you how you would do it’. I said, ‘I’ll settle for that now’. We wrote up the plan, and between November and February, we got the full devolution settlement. Why? Because I think Simon Stevens at the time, thought this was an appropriate moment to try something different.
Q: Did you find there to be a ‘Whitehall view’ on decentralisation or would you differentiate between different departments?
I think it’s a departmental view. Opposed would be Education, and the equivalent of BEIS [Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy]. Business support had been downgraded anyway. What we what we wanted to do, frankly, was to develop our own investment capabilities to support our own growth, and not be overly reliant on government support. We set up our own growth organisation; we cross-subsidised contracts and did what we can do for supporting inward trade and investment. We want to ramp that up further.
The Treasury, I think, has moved over the decades from being, neutral into a proponent. I think it changed under Alastair, the whole concept of City Deals, as the start of that process to do things differently.
Transport was opposed, until Osborne beat up the Transport Secretary. We said, ‘without re-regulating buses, there is absolutely no chance of even moving to agree to the deal. Never mind the politicians, we’re just not doing it’.
Q: If you’re thinking of the drivers of productivity and growth and economic outcomes, you probably would have put adult skills or transport higher up the priority list?
We did. We asked for everything on adult skills. And not even Osborne, with blood on the carpet, got them to move beyond where they were. The Department for Education just held onto that, and he couldn’t negotiate what we wanted. We wanted to have a local commissioning role on skills.
Q: A Department for Education official might point to TECs, Learning and Skills Councils, etc?
Except, of course, it’s never been integrated with place. The conversation we used to have with David Blunkett when he did that job was, ‘you might as well still run this from Whitehall, because what we are not doing is embedding these structures in the local fabric of places. We are not able to join any of this stuff up’.
Q: What exactly was the policy goal you had in mind while at Manchester?
Our whole approach was to reduce the demand for high dependency services, so we would become a financially self-sustaining city region. We wanted the proceeds of growth, however you measure them, to more than balance the requirement for grants. We wanted to become, ultimately, a net contributor to Exchequer funding.
Q: Was London a help or a hindrance for Greater Manchester’s economy?
No, it’s a positive. I was never part of the brigade that London should get less, and we should get more. London has always been a fundamental part of UK success and we need to build on that. I’ve always challenged the Treasury line of the zero-sum game about employment creation. I know it wasn’t driven by the need to reinforce the dominance of London, but it can work in that sort of way depending on how you appraise different priorities from different places. The Green Book methodology, by definition, is going to favour the more successful places compared to the less successful ones. We needed to find ways of levelling that up.
Q: Did you have a particular international inspiration in mind?
There was never one place that captured everything we wanted to do. If we wanted to look at a place that had driven its innovation capabilities, we would look to Tel Aviv or Bologna. If we wanted to see a strong emphasis on transport, another place. It was the combination. It’s how we learn best practice in all its different forms.
Q. What do you think are the most important lessons for us to take away?
I think it’s the whole concept of place leadership. I’m still not clear Government understands it, in the way we’ve described it today. Unless we address place leadership and get people to think hierarchically about the role and functionality of their place in the wider economic geography, we’re always going to be struggling with this sort of debate.
Q: And what is the greatest achievement in the last 40 years in regional policies?
I think the devolution settlement. And the fact that we are able to point at a place to show what can happen if you actually encourage innovation, and encourage people to lead.
ENDS