Joanne Roney (JR) OBE is the Chief Executive of Manchester City Council. She took up her position in April 2017. Prior to that Roney was Chief Executive for Wakefield Metropolitan District Council from July 2008.
James Banks (JB) is the Assistant Chief Executive at Manchester City Council.
This interview was conducted on 18 August 2022.
Q: Could you tell us about your role in local growth, regional growth over the past few decades?
JR: I’m Chief Executive of Manchester City Council and have been since 2017. Manchester Council is part of Greater Manchester Combined Authority, one of the first places in the country to do a devolution deal. Before that, I was Chief Executive of Wakefield Council in West Yorkshire which is now part of that Combined Authority. Before that, I was Deputy Chief Executive at Sheffield City Council and before that I was in Birmingham. So it has been a career of cities, but cities of different sizes, and maybe a career of cities of different economic outcomes.
JB: I’m Assistant Chief Executive at Manchester City Council. I support Joanne on all matters. I also have responsibility for policy performance and reform, which covers both the growth agenda and public service reform and issues right across our city as well as the council. I was involved previously with Greater Manchester Combined Authority in the devolution deals that happened in the mid-2010s. Before that, I was a civil servant at the Treasury, where I worked on national growth and productivity issues as well as local government funding.
Q: What do you think have been the main successes in regional growth policy in recent decades and what are the main frustrations?
JR: Some of the greatest successes for me related to the RDAs [Regional Development Agencies]. The RDAs were long-term, they aligned funding across infrastructure, social funding, and European funds. They had a strong business input into those regional strategies. They genuinely had ambition, long-term thinking and flexibility around using different bits of funding. What they lacked, however, was democratic oversight and accountability back to local areas.
The second thing that stands out for me was the city deals, done under the umbrella of devolution. That recognition of the need for partnership between cities and central government, where we agreed a level of devolved funding to a city in return for certain outcomes being delivered and a return on the public purse back to government, were two interventions that evidenced ways to transform the economic vibrancy and productivity of places.
There are a few frustrations. Housing markets have been difficult. If the strengths were about having long-term flexible funding, that enabled us to work not just as a city, but on a regional footprint with an absolute understanding in partnership between civic leaders and businesses. The frustrations came when government policy chopped and changed midway and we lost continuity. This happened with housing market renewal. Large-scale housing regeneration stopped overnight. There were plenty of other programmes that got stopped overnight. I think the other issue would be the disconnect with the RDAs. They became a little bureaucratic, a little bit top-heavy, and therefore they lost their connection to what was needed in individual places.
JB: In terms of the positives, I think the first wave of devolution deals, which put Manchester and Greater Manchester at the centre, were hugely positive. They recognised the real importance of the UK’s big cities and driving economic growth nationally. It also drove economic growth in the wider region and government made some big, bold innovative policy decisions that put at the heart of Manchester.
In terms of the frustrations, I think that the wider way in which public service funding has been cut over the past 12 years has been a frustration for us. It has had a handbraking effect on national economic growth. It’s also really harmed some of the services that are there for the most vulnerable in society, which local government is able to bring together at a place level. That’s not just the amount of funding for local government overall, but the distribution of that funding, which has gradually moved away from cities and deprived areas such as Manchester. Allied to that, more recently, have been our frustrations of how far we can bring funding and resources together at a place level. There was a lot of positivity around five to ten years ago, but that has since eroded by the increase in competitive funding amounts and more siloed funding from different government departments.
Q: Does the persistence of differences in regional incomes and growth over the last 40 years surprise you?
JR: Yes, it does. Even though I can understand why that may be, it surprises me that we haven’t closed the gaps. Despite differences of political opinion, we just have not stuck to that long-term UK productivity and economic rationale and focused on the role particularly that cities and local government play. It surprises me that despite compelling evidence, a compelling rationale, we still do the stop-start policy intervention, and we have not aligned effectively.
James talked about austerity and budget cuts to public services. I would say the big frustration for me is the lack of recognition between capital infrastructure funding and the requirement for revenue to supplement the delivery of that. There remains a fundamental misunderstanding about how things get done by government. I think government can think about the policy interventions, but they continually fail to understand how stuff gets delivered and that’s where local government comes in and that’s where the frustration comes in.
Q: When you think about the impact of London on the Yorkshire or the Manchester economies over the last 30 years, has London been a positive or a negative?
JR: London is definitely a positive for UK PLC. We certainly would be in a worse place without a successful London. So there’s no argument from me about investment in London. But what’s failed to happen is a recognition that London needs the rest of the UK to be successful and therefore, earlier on, there should have been some real attempts to have parity in investment in skills and in transport infrastructure to ‘level up’.
I think that failure to recognise that the North needed a connected transport structure and that the North needed high-level investment in skills through its universities in Research and Development, right through to its Further Education right through to its educational offer in schools. The bit that was missing was a failure to put significant investment into the North on infrastructure and skills. All of the other policies that flow, and where we are now, have all their flaws rooted in that baseline not being established. From here on in, land value capture and use of business receipts, other funding instruments that are being used are predicated on London having a greater land value, a greater BCA [Benefit-Cost Analysis], a more advantageous start than anywhere else.
Q: There’s not been a huge amount of redistribution of resources as part of previous regional deals. So is devolution the most important thing, or are the resources the most important thing?
JR: Skills and infrastructure should have had extra resources built in at the start to even up. But I think it is about devolution. When I say devolution, I mean proper devolution, not what we’ve got at the minute. I think proper devolution to me would be a flexible pot of money given to a region that could be used to meet the priorities that we would set and agree with government. Not the devolved responsibility, but still with some sort of accountability back to government. I would say where Manchester stands out has been around health devolution. This is the only place with health devolution. We’re moving into Integrated Care Boards in a different model now, but we used the health devolution opportunity to do transformation of services in neighbourhoods that increased the productivity of the city and started to close those health inequality gaps. And yet, despite compelling evidence, it’s never been adopted as a model by others.
Q: What’s more important for the economic success of Manchester, connection to London or the connectivity across the big northern economic footprint?
JR: Manchester invested heavily in the tram network and, as a council, we’re joint owners of an airport. Manchester’s economic rationale, 20 years ago, was clearly thought-through and independently assessed. It recognised that we need to use the resources that we’ve got to invest in a more integrated transport system. If I go back even further to Sheffield, with Clive Betts’ and David Blunkett’s days in Sheffield, that was all about investing in the buses and the tram network as well. I think cities have always recognised the importance of interconnectivity. It’s just not either-or, it’s both.
We also need transport to carry on up through the North, to Leeds, to Bradford and further. It’s also East to West. It’s also an integrated transport system around buses and trams. I genuinely think we’ve left it too late. This should have been part of national approach for years. It should have had a parallel in infrastructure investment. That’s what the Infrastructure Commission said.
JB: Cities can do a lot themselves. Manchester’s example of the airport and the tram system is a good one. Where government has perhaps failed to do what it needs to do is adopting the redistributive model of moving the big investments proportionately towards the North. Government should be capturing those agglomeration effects of the big cities working together across Manchester, Liverpool, Sheffield, Leeds, Newcastle and so on. A full version of the Northern Powerhouse could have moved us further. I think there’s something in the way government has approached big transport infrastructure projects, which did not sufficiently prioritise the northern agglomeration effect.
Allied to that is suburban rail and buses, as well as the tram system, in and around Greater Manchester. It’s great that we’ve got devolution of powers around the buses. It’s crazy that you can spend £1.50 on a tube journey anywhere in London, but it can cost you £4 to get around Manchester for an area where there are relatively low levels of income. That’s all wrapped up the way in which these things are funded. It’s not about doing London down. It’s about doing both up, because greater investment in these areas is going to be a real boost back to productivity across the whole of the UK.
Q: How has the relationship with Whitehall been?
JR: It’s fair to say that local government probably didn’t put transport infrastructure front and centre of everything. Partly because, outside of devolution, there weren’t effective structures in place for local government to work regionally. There were initiatives, as James said, there was the Northern Way; but outside of the RDAs, there wasn’t really a convening power to have had those conversations at scale, until devolution came along.
Neither central or local government put infrastructure investment at the heart of what it did. Nor was it clear what the delivery mechanism for that would be. At the same time, there was increased fragmentation, between deregulation of buses and privatisation of rail. We failed to join together the strategic plan here around all of that.
The mayors and the combined authorities really do come into their own in the relationship with central government. Clearly there were relationships with government through RDAs. But as I said earlier, the problem with the RDAs was that democratic oversight wasn’t there. So you wouldn’t say every city leader or indeed any local authority leader was wired into those conversations with government. What the combined authorities did was to put central government on a wider footprint alongside government. City deals did that too. City deals started to break that down. Public service agreements started to break those relations down. But these are quite new concepts of working between central and local. Traditionally, it has been large government departments, with quangos created to do economic regeneration. I think local government’s elbowed its way in through a variety of ways, as opposed to a formal structure, until the combined authority concept and the devolution arguments landed.
Q: Does Whitehall speak to local government with one united voice?
JB: We had the days of the George Osborne Treasury in the mid-2010s. They were driving devolution and were able to get traction with other departments and other ministers that they perhaps wouldn’t have talked with themselves. The work that Manchester did at the time, through Richard Leese, and Howard Bernstein and then later Joanne, involved having those conversations with officials at the Treasury in the Whitehall machine. That was a brilliant example.
Manchester, in a way, has some special privileges in Whitehall. Joanne’s point about structures is good because we need to be able to have those conversations across government more broadly. I think DCLG or its various incarnations over that time, has generally been positive about what we’re trying to do. It listens to local authority chief executive leaders, and it tries to promote their agenda across Whitehall. But often they don’t always have the power and the clout compared to other big-hitting departments. They do their kind of convening role reasonably well.
I think with the other departments, the big spending departments, we generally wax and wane in terms of how far they appreciate this agenda. Some of them, particularly the Department of Education and the Department for Work and Pensions, have struggled with this notion of devolution and how far they’re willing to let go – how far they trust local authorities to be able to drive agendas for them, rather than going down the route of appointing external organisations to do their commissioned programmes or using competitive bidding.
We had some success with the health devolution deal. Again, I think that was heavily weighted from the Treasury and Number 10 was with them. For this to work, you do need a really strong centre of government to drive the devolution agenda. You can’t leave it to the big spending departments; but you also need the technical work in the background on it all.
JR: I think it’s not so much which departments engaged, but who was driving it from within government to get that cross government buy in. I remember John Prescott’s super department, I can’t remember what it was called. It had planning and transport infrastructure. That was probably one of the most powerful. After that it was the Cabinet Office. When you’ve got that powerful figurehead in government, backed up with a commitment to put growth and economic growth at the core of what all parts of government are doing, that’s where you’ve got tractions across different departments.
Beyond that, it is down to individual personal relationships, contacts and the openness of individual ministers to come forward with fresh new ideas. Twenty years ago there was a view that local government could not be trusted with an economic growth agenda. I don’t think local government was seen to be responsible or key to convening powers with business to create growth and jobs. That would have been seen as a role foe a quasi-outside body, not a core local government function. I think it’s only in the last twenty years that civic leadership in places such as Manchester, Leeds, Sheffield and London has been at the forefront of this. That smashed through that lack of trust.
Q: What was the difference between what was happening in Manchester and what was happening in Yorkshire?
JR: For me, there are three elements to Greater Manchester that still binds it together. One is the visionary, stable leadership of Manchester – because of the city council stability. That was about building relationships and building trust and working with people. You buy into this different vision because you’re in it for the long term. You can start to park your individual anxieties because you can genuinely commit to a big vision as you trust the people in the room.
Second was an independent review and independent evidence, and that got a clear buy-in despite everybody keeping their own autonomy in Greater Manchester. There was a clear view that the city needed to be economically successful for the rest of the region to become successful. Therefore, there was a buy-in to an arrangement that would be spearheaded by Manchester and for which all would benefit. But to make that real, that commitment went straight into the shared business rates model. Manchester generates more business rates than the rest – it’s between Manchester and Salford. That gets reinvested in the tram network being extended. There was a thought-through evidence base about how we need to take control of this. We need to see our economic future. We understand that there isn’t an alternative centre to the Manchester Centre. So, stability and civic leadership, evidence-based policy, building the relationship with government with a really clear thought-through proposition and a deal that said, ‘Give us this, we’ll evidence it back.’ That’s what we did.
Third, a receptive government is a plus: if I go to my West Yorkshire experience, even with some of those conditions in place, I think West Yorkshire and indeed Yorkshire never quite settled on what was the economic rationale, and therefore, what was the right footprint for that economic rationale. It has a different geography. Is Leeds the centre of Yorkshire? Do people really believe that? Is it the capital of West Yorkshire? It never quite got its buy-in.
Q: If you take your three points: strong and stable leadership, evidence-based rationale and government engagement. Government says they tried to engage with Yorkshire, but they found that hard. Was it because there wasn’t the evidence base? Or was it that there actually wasn’t a leadership which was able to bring people together?
JR: Both of those two things. I don’t think the evidence and the rationale was fully bought into. I don’t think there was the leadership in place in all parts that committed to making a go of this. The other difference was that when you’re Greater Manchester, you’re at the forefront of it. It was an exciting time. It felt like it was in the hands of the people who were devising it. So leaders would buy into what they were signing up to because it was a negotiation with government. For those who follow Greater Manchester, things like the Mayoral model, which Greater Manchester had agreed to, it was more of an imposition in other areas. I think it was harder for other places to find their own way when there was a template over there that was being referred to all the time, where it had been done.
Q: How did the Greater Manchester model learn from what had come before?
JR: My starting point was the strengths of the RDAs, they were long-term, evidence-based, clear and able to deliver. Take that away and what did Yorkshire have as its guiding economic rationale and purpose? That was unclear. Whereas in Manchester, stable civic leadership was already addressing the economic rationale for Manchester and Greater Manchester. It wasn’t waiting for government; it was already doing. Hence the RDA would have just been a bit of a pain.
JB: Here we had a primary structural concept which was Manchester and Greater Manchester rather than the North West. The North West RDA was always a little bit awkward in its geographies and how it dealt with GM versus Merseyside, Lancashire and Cumbria.
Joanne’s mentioned Metrolink, the airport and other things: the leaders have continued to meet to work on those things around infrastructure and growth which gave them a grounding in these issues. Whatever the differences in private, they all understood the importance of working together for that wider prize, the devolution work with the government. It was partly because of the Mayoral Model that it worked. The decisions had to be made by the Mayor and the ten leaders together.
Q: How do you feel as Manchester leaders looking at Blackburn and Burnley on the outside?
JR: This is a question we talk about a lot at Greater Manchester. GM always looks to work together collaboratively, and it works through that economic rationale. That’s been great, tried and tested. It’s important to make the point that there have been different political party leaders in Greater Manchester, there’s been a huge churn of leaders. Yet the rationale of working together still hangs together.
Because there has been no rollout of devolution in a planned clear way across the UK, you have ended up with this patchwork quilt arrangement, where no combined authorities has the same powers. No mayor has got the same powers. The governance structures differ considerably between each mayoralty. That is a huge flaw in policy in the UK. There’s been no attempt to use independent evidence to say: we’ve tried different methods and approaches and this is the one that we go for. In light of that, there’s quite a lot of work we do now at Greater Manchester that isn’t just confined to the Greater Manchester Combined Authority area. We do an Evergreen fund, which is a revolving loan finance fund. We do that with Cheshire and others. We have opened opportunities to other parts of the region. We do joint work with Liverpool on life sciences, and the University of Manchester does a lot of work in Liverpool. We join that up so we no longer only work on a GM footprint.
We do a lot of reaching out and doing place-to-place deals or arrangements. I think we’ll see more of that. I can remember a very genuine conversation we had about tourism and marketing. Marketing Manchester has been incredibly successful. Other parts are struggling. We called it the Blackpool test. What does Manchester do with Blackpool? Could we start to think about Manchester as a gateway to the whole of that side of the North West? What should we be doing to our marketing and tourism agency to enhance Blackpool in terms of global reach? Where are the flights coming into the airport from, where do they go? Manchester now works more collaboratively with others where they are opportunities, but there is no formal structure to do it.
Q: Should change across England be evolutionary or voluntary?
JR: The Levelling Up White Paper should have been slightly bolder in this regard. Not to impose structures on local places, but certainly to say, ‘Look these are the models that you could have, and this is what you would gain from them.’ There must be local decision-making. Let’s move away from the competitive bidding element to funding. This is a model that you can use, and in return you get these benefits.
Q: How do you think the structure of Greater Manchester and the North West should evolve?
JR: I don’t think we have a view about what path other parts of the region take. We think they ought to form themselves in a way that we can have strategic conversations with them. But it may not be on everything. The key issue is transport connectivity. We are starting to see Transport for the North, for example, as a structure that starts to bring different places into the conversation. A structure with a shared common agenda is helpful, rather than saying, ‘Well you must have a combined authority, else Manchester won’t talk to you.’ We did another piece of work on working with all of the LEPs, where Manchester laid out a proposal for inward investment saying, ‘Should we pool our resources and have a single approach around market intelligence and overseas and would investment FDI work?’ Where we’re at now is we reach out on an issue, and we’ll work with whatever structures people want to put in place rather than have a blanket arrangement across the country.
JB: I’d add that the Core Cities network is also important for us. Manchester is working with other big cities on a range of shared agendas. We’re trying to take the core cities down the route of standing up for themselves a bit more and looking at the power of the assets that we’ve all got and how we can leverage that, for example, inward investment and the investment we need around climate change infrastructure, rather than just using it as a kind of negotiating device of government.
We created the Council for the North as an attempt to try to do that piece of work for Burnley, to bring together those places who were not wired into any formal structure. There was some traction with government on that with Jake Berry. There was a conversation about whether there could be a Council of the North model. I think the Levelling Up White Paper did away with that. If you haven’t got a formal governance structure in place, but you’ve still got your Blackburns and your Burnleys left behind, not even county deals are going to deal with that. If you’re not prepared to do a local government reorganisation then it is up to us in local government to create alternative structures to work together where it makes sense.
JR: That’s the real issue. Core cities are very powerful, strong places, resource-rich in comparison to some places. They are able to pull together policy, strategy, thinking, commissioning and external work. It’s a shame, but I think people started to think all the money was going to core cities and that all the economic rationale was core cities. Therefore, if you weren’t a core city, you had to be anti the cities and set up counter structures. That’s nonsense. I think individual core cities have to think about how they work with their regional partners. I genuinely think with Manchester, and in the North West, the region is not suspicious of Manchester. We saw that through COVID, we see it through our networks, and also because we are generous in sharing our learning. Other core cities have not put themselves in the place where they are able to evidence and articulate that anything they win or achieve is for the benefit of the whole. We have worked hard at that.
When I was in Wakefield, I remember economic strategies that were almost deliberately devised to undermine. But as chief executive of Wakefield, I think my biggest breakthrough was to get the leader of Wakefield to see that, actually, we were 15 minutes away from Leeds and therefore a successful Leeds was going to be good for Wakefield. If we reinvented Wakefield as a place that was a great place to live with a strong cultural offer and invested in opportunities for young people and things to do, we would make Wakefield economically successful. From that you get the turnaround of Castleford, investment in Pontefract Castle, the Hepworth Gallery: you get a rationale that says, ‘Wakefield is never going to be Leeds. It’s not going to be a commerce centre for the North. Instead, it could be a fantastic place to live and raise your kids and have a family and hop on a train and get to Leeds.’ Brilliant.
Places have to do that thinking. Which goes back to the Independent Economic Review that was done in Manchester. That gave every part of GM a sense of purpose on their own. And the most recent success is the Stockport Mayoral Development Corporation. Stockport very proudly describe themselves as the Brooklyn to Manchester’s Manhattan.
Q: Could you just tell us a bit more about how you thought the RDA performed?
JR: My view of the RDAs, from Sheffield and Wakefield, was that they did plug the gap on a regional economic strategy. Had they created a more structured environment to engage with local government leaders, I think they would have been incredibly successful. What happened was they owned the strategy, they owned the money and we were effectively being held to account by them. I think we lost the sense that they worked with us. They were just a government organisation that we were working for. Even despite all their successes. over time that increased the frustration of local government. People asked, ‘Well who are they?’ The board meetings were private. Papers were private. It just fuelled that lack of oversight. It didn’t work partly because they plugged the gap that leaders should have been plugging.
JB: It was a bit harder for the North West to get the value of the RDA compared to the Greater Manchester dimension, which was more central to our thinking at the time. There were different geographies in the RDAs. As a civil servant dealing with them in the mid-2000s, I found them incredibly useful because it was a place where you could go to get a coherent view of the area that had already worked through the different priorities. That could give you a coherent strategy for a large area. So as a government official, they were a brilliant way of doing business, rather than having to talk to many local authorities. Behind the scenes it didn’t quite fit with local democratic accountability; but that could have been improved and they’d have had a more lasting impact.
JR: At the time, government also had Government Offices in regions. There was an infrastructure that just doesn’t exist anymore. It’s all gone. So, I think it is very difficult for government now to think ‘How do they reach Blackpool, how do they reach Blackburn?’ There isn’t a mechanism to do it.
Q: What is the reform that would help you move the dial most in Greater Manchester?
JR: We ought to be clear what it is we expect from central government as part of Levelling Up. That is infrastructure and skills for me. That demands be large-scale, long-term, full commitments backed by Treasury, from HS2 through to northern connectivity. On skills, I think that should be addressed across the UK as a whole. I don’t think we should rely on just having combined authorities in place to get devolved skills funding. There’s a real rethink needed across the UK on skills. Third one would be Research and Development and innovation. Manchester and Birmingham have got innovation pilots from government – joint boards with our universities and others – but there is a real need to look at a UK-wide approach to generating innovation and R&D.
Then on devolution and accountable structures: if not imposed, that effective model of governance and accountability needs to be in place. For me, greater devolution in Manchester is further control of skills budget. More control over integrated transport. Give us freedom and flexibility to use whatever the single pot of money that is available to be devolved. Give us the freedom and flexibilities to retain more of what we generate in order to create revolving funds. So the big grab about Piccadilly Station is because the Treasury model and the network rail model aren’t aligned in terms of how land value is captured in a long-term plan. There are just some things that government could do differently that would empower us to take the risk if we get the reward.
I think I can see the American model working. Our problem is that the Treasury rules are about BCA [Benefit-Cost Analysis] and rate of return. If our baseline is so low, and all we get is a percentage of our business rates, which are already suppressed, then we don’t generate enough money in the first instance. If our housing fund doesn’t pay for infrastructure works up front or contaminated land up front, the land value is minus. So, we haven’t got the value from which to regenerate our areas.
I agree with the principle that with greater devolution should come fiscal devolution as well and the ability to raise different money. I think there needs to be greater accountability for mayors in that model. I do support devolution –- financial freedom but greater accountability. What you don’t want is a new mayor coming in with massive local tax raising powers that impact on places without any accountability for what’s delivered through that or overall governance.
Q: Do you worry that the poorer parts of the country would lose out?
JR: They did lose out, or they wouldn’t be able to take advantage of the freedom and flexibilities because there’d be no headroom in the uplift to become a revolving reinvesting fund. That’s what they should all be about. If we’re going to move away from government grants supporting the poorer parts of the country from the wealthier parts of this country, then you either do a baseline fair funding on investment and infrastructure work that gets us up to an economically competitive baseline, irrespective of local governments. Government step in and does that. And then you give us the powers and the flexibilities to drive our own destinies through the combined authority model.
And a baseline certainty of funding for core public services. Because we can have the best economic strategy ever, we can have some of the greatest global businesses, but frankly, if I’m at the point where my council services budget is getting decimated, children will suffer, young people suffer, the place becomes unattractive, poverty will eat your economic purpose, and it all unravels. So, core baseline certainty of public funding, freedom of flexibilities through a devolved model, core government contribution to level up infrastructure and skills.
Q: What do you think are the main lessons for us to take away?
JB: I think it’s really about trust. It’s about central government being prepared to let go and try things in different parts of the country. That may not always work 100 per cent, but the current model of the highly centralised country doesn’t always work 100 per cent at the moment either. Some of the arguments against are slightly false. There are places which are ahead of the game, like Greater Manchester as we’ve talked about. But that’s not a reason to not do it elsewhere as well.
JR: There’s enough evidence to show what is possible, and government should back more of those plans. The government needs a long-term economic strategy for the country as a whole, and they need to stick to it and be clear what needs to change in order to deliver it. I don’t think UK PLC has got a clearly articulated economic strategy.
ENDS