Six years ago, Conservative chancellor George Osborne took to the stage at Manchester’s Science and Industry Museum and announced the Northern Powerhouse partnership.
“The cities of the North are individually strong, but collectively not strong enough,” he said at the time, promising devolved powers for the region along with a slew of transport investment.
Fast forward to the present, and some devolution has taken place, particularly in Greater Manchester. But despite prime minister Boris Johnson’s pledge to “level up” the region, many of Osborne’s transport promises remain unfulfilled. Andy Burnham, Manchester’s mayor, has spoken of the danger that the project is beginning to “fizzle out”.
So, is the Conservative government’s vision of a collaborative and highly devolved region falling apart at the seams? And what does it tell us for how cities can co-operate with one another going forward?
Healthy competition
To understand how cities best work together, we must also appreciate that they are “competitive beasts”, according Steve Turner, director for devolved authorities at Connected Places Catapult.
“By that I mean they compete globally to attract the best talent and retain that talent, to drive themselves in terms of economic growth,” he says, speaking as part of EG’s Future of UK Cities event.
Stephen Cowperthwaite, principal at Avison Young, agrees. He points to Liverpool and Manchester, both key players in the Northern Powerhouse partnership, as prime examples of this.
Liverpool is building a state-of-the-art technology campus at Paddington Village, as well as an existing innovation site near the village of Daresbury. Manchester boasts its Oxford Road corridor, which has been at the forefront of a number of vital scientific developments in recent years. Both have serious cases for being the most influential UK city in music and popular culture outside of the capital. Even their Premier League football clubs are bitter rivals.
But despite their differences, the two are “only 40 miles down the road, which in a global context is nothing at all”, says Cowperthwaite. This should breed collaboration just as much as it does competition.
“There are points of differentiation between the offer in the two city regions that are very complementary and help both cities compete on a global stage,” he says. “So it is learning when to compete and when to work together that is vitally important.”
Looking further afield
And it is not just through actively working together that cities can benefit from one another’s successes. This is something that Amanda Reynolds, director at architect AR Urbanism, who is working on the redevelopment of Southampton’s waterfront Mayflower Quarter, has found.
“We just constantly look at everybody else’s work,” she says. “We benchmark other port cities and other urban developments that also relate to the types of things we are doing.”
Nor is that confined to the UK. “We’re looking around Europe in particular; Scandinavia has done a lot of fantastic port redevelopments in Oslo and Malmo,” she adds.
“We are looking at how they have developed these areas right next to, or distant from their city centres and incorporating some of the best aspects of those… and we will apply what relates to a British context.”
Local powers
However, while many local authorities are able to co-operate, there remains a clear disconnect between their ideas of how to run themselves and those of central government in Westminster. It is especially pertinent given that last year the Conservatives won a raft of votes in the North on a promise to “level-up” cities in the region.
Cowperthwaite says further devolution is of “fundamental importance” to local authorities.
“We live in a very centralised democracy still,” he says. “What we need to be careful of is that levelling up doesn’t go the way of cannonballs and powerhouses as a slogan that ultimately does not mean anything.
“The local leaders know their regions and they know what the issues are, and they know how best to address them.”
Patricia Brown, director at Central believes that a lack of trust between regional mayors and the national government is standing in the way. The issue was typified with Burnham’s standoff with Johnson over financial support in the face of mounting coronavirus restrictions in early October.
“What we are seeing is that breakdown of trust because people have got powers up to a point, but there’s still a nanny state saying ‘we know better than you’.”
Turner’s view is even more stark. “Thinking about this levelling up agenda, I think some places are, let’s be honest, levelling down,” he says. “Let’s not ignore that.”
Devolution, says Turner, holds the key to putting that right.
“Increasingly, if cities are going to be the economic drivers of national growth, they need to have those powers vested in them to enable them to make the investments in the areas that will make a real impact.”
