It is very easy to paint a glowing picture of Bristol. A city with the vibrancy of the capital but surrounded by green. A city that has been labelled one of the happiest in the UK, a green city, a Fairtrade city, the UK’s first cycling city and a city of hope.
But it is also a city that suffers from inequality. A city where one quarter of children live in low-income families, where more than 70,000 people are living in income deprivation and where homelessness is on the rise.
For Bristol mayor Marvin Rees, now four years into what has become a five-year term due to the coronavirus pandemic, fixing that inequality and building on its promise of becoming a city of hope is high on his agenda.
Becoming mayor, he has said, is an expression of a deeper commitment to building a fairer and more inclusive world. A commitment that is a product of the circumstances of his birth.
“My mum had me in 1972, unmarried,” says Rees. “I use this description. It’s a bit brutal, but she was an unmarried white woman, not much money, with a brown baby on the way.”
Rees spent some of his early years living in a refuge and watched as his mother, a “sub-working-class woman with a brown baby” was disrespected by those around her.
“That burned into me,” says Rees. “Since then I’ve always had a sense of concern for people I thought were being left behind or being mistreated. That has been a sense of burden I have carried and wanted to do something about.”
And while Rees knows there is still much to be done in Bristol to fix its inequalities, he has not let that burden of responsibility sit too heavily on him while in office. He has sought to find ways to ease that burden, including creating the Bristol Equality Charter and the Stepping Up programme. (Rees is also lending his support to EG’s Future Leaders project).
The Bristol Equality Charter is a city-wide initiative that aims to make Bristol a place where everyone feels they belong, a place that celebrates diversity and promotes inclusion, participation and equal access. The Stepping Up project was launched in 2018 as a 12-month programme to support Black and Minority Ethnic women and disabled leaders. Some 60% of the first cohort of the project have gone on to get promotions and it is a scheme that Rees and his team are immensely proud of.
“Some 56% of children in my city did not get access to meaningful work experience when I came into office. That has a lifetime of consequences because it sets the trajectory for your career,” says Rees. “So we’ve tried to work on specific interventions to support companies, to identify talent, bring them up through the ranks and deal with the wider drivers of social immobility.”
Life lessons
Rees says business has a key role to play in enabling equality. He recalls his own experience as a journalist working for the BBC in the early 2000s. He had just returned from the US, where he had completed his second masters degree and had been working with Bill Clinton adviser Tony Campolo. He was moving at 100mph, he says, and was ready to be a big success.
But at the BBC he failed to progress. He says he started to self-edit when he realised he wasn’t being listened to. The culture created a barrier to progression, so Rees stopped pushing. Then he left. Realising that he wasn’t going anywhere, he moved on. Within five years he was a Yale World Fellow, a member of an international fellowship for rising global leaders at the Ivy League university. Five years after that he was mayor of Bristol and a member of the executive committee of the global parliament of mayors.
“There was a five-year period where an organisation had no ability to create an environment that allowed me to develop my skills, flourish and contribute,” says Rees.
Luckily for him, he says, he had resilience. A desire to never give up. Instilled in him by those formative years as the “brown baby” to an unmarried, sub-working-class, white woman, and as a young man striving to make it as a Royal Marines officer. That was a career path cut off due to some eye issues, but it was a training that has instilled in him that resilience and a life lesson he will share with any young future leader: Surround yourself with people who are smarter than you. Allow people to do what they are best at and do what you can to facilitate that.
“You find great people,” says Rees, “and you let them be great at what they can be great at. Then everyone wins.”
It is that thinking that he is trying to apply to Bristol to make it great, to enable it to win. And this is where he sees mayors and city leaders taking a greater role in the prosperity of the UK.
“There has been a real surge of the need for cities to have a greater opportunity to shape the national and international context in which they work,” says Rees. “Not just to shape what goes on inside the city boundaries, but to be involved.”
He adds: “What you’re seeing at the moment around Covid is another example of diversity of thought. We cannot take this challenge on simply by a few clever people sitting in rooms in Whitehall and Westminster dreaming up solutions for Manchester, Newcastle or Bristol, Cardiff, Glasgow. That ain’t going to work.
“We’re also seeing the urgent need to really lock down a change in the nature of the relationship between city government and national government,” says Rees. “It is not two tiers of government anymore. In fact, I would say there’s much more dynamism and vision and focus on delivery in our cities and towns than there is in the turgid processes of Whitehall and Westminster. So we need a new sovereign settlement. Unless we do that, I don’t think we’ll ever untap the full potential of this country. National government does not have the machinery to be able to enable this country to deliver in a way that it could.”
Rees urges the government to find the machinery and the people that can operate it and let them enable the country to deliver.
For Rees, the built environment is part of that machinery. He is well aware that he needs the built environment and the private sector to enable him to help Bristol deliver on its promise of hope and equality.
“People in the built environment have a huge role to play,” says Rees. “For me, homes is one of the single most significant social policy interventions we can make. When people ask me what helped me escape the circumstances of my birth, boxing is one, having a loving family and couple of good teachers is another, but having a stable home was massive.”
Reconceptualise, replan, rebuild
Rees has delivered some 7,000 homes during his tenure as mayor, with around 1,000 of those affordable. He clearly wants to deliver more, but for him, the built environment has a much bigger role to play than just providing a roof over Bristolians’ heads. It has an opportunity and responsibility to provide a liveable city.
“We’re at a stage now where we need our cities to go on 15-20-year journeys,” he says. “They need to be reconceptualised, replanned and rebuilt. They need to be decarbonised and they need to be made nature-friendly.”
He adds: “We want to see species return to the city. We want greenery around, wild areas where insects can come again. Cities have responsibility now to do that. But local government can’t do it alone. We need people with vision and the imagination and the expertise on how to decarbonise our city systems. That’s where we need the sector to start realising the scale of responsibility that is on its shoulders.”
It is the burden of responsibility to fix the inequalities. Rees feels it and wants the built environment to feel it too, because by leaning on each other’s strengths, they can fix it.
“I think we have many, many challenges within the city and these are going to get worse over the coming months,” says Rees matter of factly. “We have one in four of our children living in poverty and we have a large number of children at risk of hunger. We still have a housing crisis. We have fractures that will probably be exacerbated over the coming economic downturn. There are many, many points of challenge and weakness and some of those will leave us found wanting.
“But what we always have is that source of effort and work and people in the city who, in the face of all that, want to step up and do something about it. And succeed or fail, it’s inspiring to be to have these people around.”
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