 Is? Is he? Are you up to go? Ym ni. Thank you. I'm just going to let. We're going to let the last one. I'm not going to call them stragglers at the back, but the last few people to grab their food can grab a seat. Then we can get going. It's great to see so many people here today. There's not many cities in Britain where you get turnouts like this at lunchtime to discuss the economic strategy the city. So that is a good sign of progress. You did have a free lunch though. First of all, some of us are being nice about Manchester. If you want to start running it down, that's your prerogative? Right, okay, let's get started. Good afternoon everyone, my name's Torsten Bell. I'm the chief executive of the Resolution Foundation. We're here today to talk about the role of Greater Manchester in the British economy. It's a slightly different perspective from how often these debates start, which is starting from the perspective of Greater Manchester I hope that the next thing is to say is that Britain needs greater Manchester to succeed. That is our starting point and we are coming to that view as part of the Economy 2030 enquiry, which is now a nearly three-year-long piece of work with will be about 60-70 reports by the time it finishes on 4 December, dating your diary. anyone in the fantasy trip to London? Then on what the future of the UK economy and the UK economic strategy should be, because you might have noticed it's not going that well then. So how do we get growth up across the United Kingdom, and how do we get inequality down is the premise of that work that's funded by the Nuffield Foundation, and it's a joint piece of work between ourselves at the Resolution Foundation and the London School of Economics. But today we're talking about where it does Greater Manchester fit into that national economic strategy. y gallu'r ffordd yma'r rwynt yn ycynllun i'w Manchester sydd o wnghwyl yn mynd i'r rydyn ni'n amser. Rydyn ni'nnghymru, yna'r newid y cyflwydd. Pa yn ymlaen i gwaith? Cynal y llunedd ymlaen yw nod i bwysig? Mae ffais gynhyrchu pam rhlynydd yn y wasbyddedd ac yn gwneud o'r pannol. Y gwybod rhai'r perrociol gynhyrchu y gallwn yn rhaid ddorog ar hyn o'r hwych. Mae'r chweithio hefyd i gyrtaeth London. I went up to Manchester the other day and there's a lot of cranes there, which is obviously the only measure of economic progress anyone can cope with. There's a lot of cranes and even some tall buildings. A lot of people say there's too many tall buildings, but in one of them sometimes they say that's a good thing. For the next thought, it's not always said but often the next thought is so it's job done. So, basically, or an even more extreme version of job done, which is it's gone too far. The great Manchester is now too successful, we need to worry about other parts of the country or other parts of the north. Western actually might be a problem if the great Manchester did too well. I think although that question of complacency or job done and whether that is right in the British context is like a large part of what we want to make sure we talk a bit today. Now, to cards on the table, our view is that it's complete nonsense and could people please not measure economic progress by cranes? Henry will say that more politely because he's an academic in a second but that is our starting point. I think that is worth wrestling with and that is different in greater Manchester to other parts of the country. That's one of the big differences. People have seen big progress. Some people feel ambivalent about that. Some people think that's great but we don't need to do any more. The question is do we and if we do what is a plausible way to make that progress happen? In terms of how we discuss that, you've got a great panel. First of all Henry Overman, who is one of the authors of this report and a professor of economic geography at the London School for Economics. No boo's for the word London. It's not his fault. We will make lifestyle choices. There is going to give you a summary of a report we published today on exactly what I just said. What is the plausible route to greater Manchester being significantly more productive in the next 20 years? We are talking here about an economic strategy in about 20 years. We are not talking about people pretending if you just have this particular power devolved or if you just have one other bit of transport policy changed or something else that everything suddenly magically gets fixed. It's a long game economic development, which I'm sure everyone understands. Henry is going to give us a short presentation of that report first of all. Then you are going to hear from Bev Craig, who is the leader of Manchester City Council but also leads for the combined authority on economic development. As we said, we think Greater Manchester's success is a necessary part of Britain returning to something that looks like economic success. You are then going to hear from Will Garten, who is the director general for levelling up at the Department for Wait for It. Levelling up housing and communities. You can never have enough titles in a department's name. Then you are going to hear from General Williams, who is the Northern England correspondent at the Financial Times and does a brilliant job of making sure that the pink newspaper has some coverage in it with the word Manchester. Sometimes other parts of the north. Do they have a moan that you are clearly biased? I'm trying really hard not to be biased. I shouldn't really be here now. You should be here, but it's a great audience. That is the plan. Hopefully you are going to ask some questions. If you want to ask them on Slido, then it's hashtag Greater Manchester. If you want to ask them in the room, there are some mics. Can you raise your hand when we get to that part of the discussion? Everyone clear on the plan? Great. Let's get going. Henry, over to you. What's in the report? I've learnt my lesson about stepping carefully when getting down from stages. Let me talk you through this. This is a 10-12 minute presentation of a huge project led by Lindsay Judge and a team of people. At Resolution Foundation at LSE, so we wouldn't be here without all the hard work they have put in. Obviously I can only gloss to surface here and I hope we're going to get into some of the sort of details in the discussion that we're going to have together. We're interested in a plausible path to greater prosperity and this plausible is going to be important as we go along. This is part of a too-pronged thing where some of what we've done is talking about Birmingham and today we're here to talk about Manchester, hence the tale of two cities. So what's the task? Here is the task as we see it. The task is to make greater Manchester function more effectively than it currently does as a city region. We've different parts of the region successfully playing a role in that and acknowledging that they're going to play different roles, just like different parts of the national economy play different roles. That's going to put together support and attract high-value firms and the high-skill workers that are going to work for those firms. So that we think is the task and I'm going to give you a little bit about how we think we would pull various policy levers to get there. The goal is to reduce the productivity gap between the city and London from 35% to 20%. It's kind of arbitrarily chosen but it also happens to be the gap between Paris and Lyon. So we're looking internationally and saying, well look, there's a country which people often point to, having narrower spatial disparities than us so let's set that as a goal. I'm going to give you some quite precise numbers. This is a caveat I'm going to make right now. It's all spurious precision. It is here to give you a feeling for the magnitude of the challenge we face. You should not take any of these numbers too seriously. We're at the strategic level. Lots of work would be done locally to take these numbers into a concrete plan for what happens in the city. So let's start with the idea about what we think firms in Manchester need to be doing differently to narrow this productivity gap. This slide here basically allows us to make three points. The first is, if you look at the left-hand side, that plots the productivity in firms, the distribution of productivity in firms in Greater Manchester, Birmingham and cities in the Greater Southeast. You see those things sit on top of one another. In local services, what we might think of as the foundation economy, productivity in our firms looks pretty similar across the three major cities. That doesn't say doing stuff in these sectors is not important. Actually, we know GM is trying to do stuff here on pay and progression in these type of jobs. We strongly think that that should continue, not least because 50% of the economy work in these jobs, and they're vitally important to local people, but they're not where narrowing the gap is going to come. We think narrowing the gap comes in the second side of this, the right-hand side of this, as you look at it. That basically plots the productivity distribution across firms that work in the tradeable sector. That is firms that serve national and international markets. What you can see is that it's here where the really big gap emerges. London just has lots of much higher productivity firms in the tradeable sector than Manchester or Birmingham. We think that needs to change. That mention of tradeable firms, you can go two directions with that. I could mean manufacturing. We discussed this a lot in the report. I think it's clear that manufacturing will still have a role to play in Manchester. It will be more important in some parts of the Greater Manchester area than others, but we don't think it is central to the catch-up strategy. We don't think it's central for the fundamental reason that it doesn't actually employ very many people and that there is no city across the OECD that has managed a major reindustrialisation in the last 20 years. You can try to come up with a strategy that's going to suggest about what we might do for manufacturing, how we might grow employment shares, we think that's important, we just don't think that that's where the main action can be. Where we think the main action has to be is on tradeable high-value services serving national and local economies. What do we need to do to get firms more productive in those things? We need a bunch of things. We need firms to invest much more. This graph here shows on the bottom X axis the change in gross value added per job, the change in productivity that we'd like to achieve, and on the Y axis it suggests the increase in capital per job that we would need to see in Manchester to underpin that change. How do we get here, details are in the paper, but it basically comes from doing analysis where we look at the relationship between capital per job, skills, et cetera, and productivity across the whole of the United Kingdom and figure out what drives what. Point one, change needs firm to invest more. Point two is we need the labour force to be higher skilled. Again, on the bottom here is the change we're trying to achieve and on the Y axis here is the change in graduate share that we think would need to happen to achieve that. That's 37% of the population with a degree up to 43%. The report goes into how we might achieve this. I think that upskilling and higher graduation rates from the local population are worthy goals in and of themselves, independent of this strategy. I think it fundamentally changes people's life chances, but the report makes it clear that the flow that we get from feasible changes there will not be enough to shift this in the kind of time span that we're talking about here. You need to attract and retain more graduates. Okay, so hugely important what you do for education for your own kids, but the strategy at its heart has attracting and retaining more graduates and you feel for how many warning, spurious precision point coming up just over 180,000. Okay, is the number that we talk about in the report. The next part of this, and I bet this is going to be possibly the most controversial point and we can get into this in the discussion, we argue that the kind of activities we're talking about are going to be concentrated in the city centre. Now this is a story about where we think that private sector investment is going to have to occur if we want to achieve this GVA uplift. There are two parts of this argument. One part to this argument is that these firms benefit from so-called agglomeration economies. The benefits of being close to lots of other firms doing similar kinds of stuff. You already see how concentrated activity is in the city centre from that left-hand thing, which plots GVA per Sqeilant. A reaction to that is, oh my goodness, we've got to spread this out. That is just wishful thinking is what we're arguing here. You've got to play to your strengths. Part of the reason why you've got to play to your strengths is because you are trying to stop the great big sucking sound, pulling stuff down to London and the south-east. Firms, by their location choices, are saying the centre is where they want to be for these kind of activities. The right-hand thing gives you the other part of the argument here, which is just jobs there are more productive. You need to play to that strength rather than work against it. The big problem, which is on the x-axis here, is that the city centre employs a low proportion of people in Manchester relative to other places in the productivity advantage that it offers. How am I doing for time? Does it get no clock now? You mean medium. Medium? OK. Now here we get to the policy levers that would need to be pulled from a local perspective, and these are going to involve investment across GM, but with a strategy to deepen the pool of labour, particularly high-skilled, and link it into those city centre firms that we're trying to get to invest. So this thing here just breaks down how well-connected different parts of the city are. One thing we've got to do is improve that through investment in transport. The improvements that we talk about increase the share of existing graduates who are well-connected to the city centre from 62% to 70%. You are going to have to do more than that. So the other thing that you're going to have to do is more houses at greater density. Now, whether the city centre is the most controversial point, or this is the most controversial point, this is probably not controversial in a sense that everyone agrees we need to do it, but it's possibly the hardest thing to deliver on. And again, we can get into that. We've got to build them in the right places as well. And you'll see from this that he's not all in Manchester and the centre. It's spread out all over the places. Now, while we're doing this, we're doing this for a couple of reasons. In the economist, nasty strategy, where I'm just focusing on that, it's to make the place more attractive to high-skilled workers and stop costs pushing up. In the other part, where I care about who benefits from this, it is about making sure that lower-skilled existing residents do not lose out. So, what's the scale of the challenge? It's £30 billion of extra capital, that's 15% uplift. It's 180,000 more graduates. It's £5 billion on transport, which is £2 billion over what you've already been allocated. It's £126,000 extra homes. It's £350 million to accelerate house building. It's £2.1 billion in a social housing subsidy to check that the poorest people aren't left out. Let me just loop back to the housing thing and who's going to benefit. If we don't get the housing stuff right, the major losers are the poorer families. We absolutely have to get it right. This graph here just shows you vintils. You're poor if you're on the left-hand side, you're rich if you're on the right. The line here is what happens if we get the housing strategy right in terms of income uplift, which comes from higher wages and more jobs. The bars are what happens if we manage 50% of the housing target. It's too depressing to put, and that's the additional, it's too depressing to put these bars on if we don't manage that 50%. The bottom suffer really bad income loss. I hope I've done all right. I went as fast as I could. Major change is needed. Lots of nuance in the report. I think it has implications for the national government, for local government, and it has implications for the people of Manchester. I'm very keen in the discussions that we don't lose sight of that. I'm looking forward to hearing from the panel on how they think we'll face up to those changes. Great. Thank you, Henry. Can you hear a clap? As you can tell, the report basically says we don't think it's job done. It's good progress, but it's not job done. Not least because if we look at the progress over the last 20 years, it's basically Greater Manchester finishing its period of relative decline and it's now in a period of keeping up with the country as a whole. That's the big difference between Greater Manchester and say Birmingham or West Yorkshire. Those two places are still going backwards relative to the UK as a whole. GM has held steady. It's not massively caught up, which is why it's not job done, but it has stopped this period of relative decline, which is a triumph in some ways. Then the report is setting out, ignoring this furious accuracy problem, the scale of the change. So don't pretend it's just like do this one little thing. And then in the same way that it starts from different parts of the country have different roles to play in the economy. They're all important. Derby's role is going to be as a manufacturing centre. Lots of places are. Norfolk is a nice place to live for older people. Anyone look at the report yesterday from the ONS on people aged over 100? Anyone? You've all got lives, have you? Not fair. Good man. Those of you with lives, you've made the wrong choices, go and look at the report. What's really interesting is there's hundreds of 100-year-old people now. They're everywhere, but they're in Manchester. They're all at the seaside. Right. And that's fine. That is the economic strategy for the seaside. Older, rich people live there. They're not doing any productivity. That's fine. Life's not just about productivity, but GM should be there. So get on with that. And in the same way that different parts of the country have different roles to play in the national economy, we're emphasising that different parts of Greater Manchester are all important, but have different roles to play in the Greater Manchester economy. And you need to make your choices on transport, housing, everything else to reflect that, land use. That's the kind of frame. So, Bev, it's very easy to write reports. But SG isn't always easy. But sometimes it's easy. But it is harder to run cities. What's the plan? Yes. Thanks, Torsten. And it's always a pleasure to be on a panel that will get me in trouble simultaneously with Tracy Brabin in Yorkshire. They're saying they're going backwards and Norfolk at the same time at the seaside. So for those live tweeting, it's all Torsten, not me. But on a serious note, I think we in Manchester and Greater Manchester have been, I suppose, supportive of the intellectual challenge that comes with a report like this. I think one of the reasons that we find ourselves where we have in Greater Manchester is precisely because we continue to keep internally asking ourselves these questions over and over again. So perhaps this is rare these days for a politician. But I'm not shy of headlines that say you should be considering this or considering that. So hopefully what we'll have today is a good debate in the round. I think for me, the heart of what this report angles at is in many ways leads to the question what kind of city do we want to have in Manchester and a city region in Greater Manchester and what kind of economy do we want to have to get us there. And I suppose my first point would be not to overlook and you would expect me to say this, the interconnectedness between growth and the conditions of growth. I'll come on to that later in terms of what I mean because actually for a geography and a demographic like Greater Manchester to simply go after a more productive economy without thinking about some of the social and spatial inequalities and disparities that exist within our city and city region means that we wouldn't be equipped to be able to have that conversation. So from a city growth perspective you just have to look around outside of this window. Manchester and indeed Greater Manchester has changed dramatically in terms of how it appears visually for those not well accustomed to a geography if you look at those towers over there they're in fact in Salford so it's not just Manchester that's popping up all of its cranes and I suppose the other thing I'd say before I get into some of the responses that Henry's flagged is it is a live political debate and not one to be overstated where people look at a city like Manchester and they make judgments on the nature of our economy and the nature of our people based on the outside fabric of our buildings and if you just look at the city centre it tells a completely different story to a city where unfortunately 44% of our kids are still growing up in poverty a city that unfortunately is still the sixth most deprived local authority in the country and the most deprived local authority in Greater Manchester on the economic and politicians that make choices on the back of that saying that Manchester has had its fill isn't just damaging to Manchester but as we can see from this report it will damage the UK's economy more broadly so I suppose a couple of specifics from me and there's lots of I suppose interesting stories and captures around some of the progress that we've seen the first point I've made is how we've got here has been one of intentionality is to have a variety of frontier sectors in our economy in Greater Manchester all the history shows if you predicate your economic success purely on one industry then you're likely to fail it means that you're beholden to what the market does or doesn't do and we see not just going back to our own history with the industrial revolution and the struggles that we had following that but looking at tech and the dotcom bubble cities that build themselves just on one thing and over time to weigh in so we wanted to build a diverse economy that focused on the balance between our frontier sectors that we know would drive up productivity over a period of time but not losing sight of the fact of where the vast majority of Greater Monkelians are employees and that's why that has to remain simultaneously as important to us as city leaders as much as driving up productivity more broadly I think as we've seen and if you'd have said 15-20 years ago that Manchester is a city and as a city region would have a ffintech industry worth 5 billion pines to our economy that we would have a visitor economy across Greater Manchester worth 9 billion pines to the economy in terms of GVA we wouldn't have believed you so I think that's takeaway number one that actually despite holding ourselves a lot internal challenge to have achieved what we've achieved in a city region without some of the necessary levers that will really drive forward our growth I think is something not to be sniffed at and as we've seen that growth what we see is some of the consequences of success albeit on productivity terms relative success but you see that challenge in the housing market so we have the challenge not just to build new homes for the new workers that we know we will attract to the city and the city region make sure that we're keeping Manchester and Greater Manchester highs in market moving in the city of Manchester alone we've committed to building 36,000 homes 10,000 of which genuinely affordable and what I would say is that we're based on pragmatism so we've got a number that we think we can build ambitious, stretching of course and officers in the room will know nod their heads vigorously looking at you Becca but what I've also said we could up that number but we base a realistic figure on stretch and challenge I would add to that though some of the other challenges that we see and it's rightly teased out in the report around how we utilise land and I suppose for me if you think about the city centre and the change that we've had in the city centre there's a different question that we're always seeking to answer that isn't just in the market of job creation and that's around how do you create a thriving place to live and I think I would draw attention to you may look at the headlines of the visitor economy and you might think that that's purely an economic ploy to get people living in the city but if over a 12 month period we're opening factory international at Aviva Studios and co-op live that's not going after a tourist economy although that's a part of keeping our people in work that's runs to the core of creating a good thriving place to live and rarely in economic policy do we talk about fun but some of the best cities that you live in across the world are also some of the cities where people have the most fun and you might not have expected that over a lunchtime presentation but actually sustainable, inclusive and exciting neighbourhoods are predicated on having more than just simply going to work and I suppose within that what I draw is attention to being sustainable when I get nudged at a moment but for me thinking about long term sustainable growth that seems to drive in our prosperity as a city region an increase in productivity but it's done in a sustainable way that community infrastructure can cope with and I think we've got some interesting international lessons from that so we have places for everyone in Greater Manchester and we're getting very very close to having that agreed and signed off to be able to move on and that meets the challenge around jobs and it meets the challenge around homes but the choice to do this in a sustainable way means and I don't want to pick in a city but if you look in the report the productivity growth that a city like Austin has seen 21% that's quoted in its figures in terms of its rise I visited Austin in March your hands have anyone been to Austin recently what you can see there is a city that's gone too far and too fast I don't run very often you can probably tell I do run but not jogging on a single little half an hour jog around Austin one morning I counted over 300 people that were sleeping on the streets and chatting to their mayor one of the things that they talked about was not having the community infrastructure that could keep up with that so I think there is a lesson in that and a lesson that probably I would finish on that for me we have a plan in our city region that can only be accelerated by support and levers that some people nationally would be able to afford us so for example one of the single quickest things you could do to help Manchester's housing market would be to uplift the local housing alliance sounds like a very small thing to do in the context of what we are talking about today but in one swoop you could make an intervention that actually takes the pressure off the bottom and helps us move on sustainably or in transport obviously anyone from Greater Manchester won't have missed the fact that we are very excited about our yellow buses that are coming just next week but we know through economic analysis that every one pound that is invested into our transport system in Greater Manchester delivers three to four pounds in terms of GVI so actually the return on investment from national government means we have a plan we have ambition we have a track record to deliver but ultimately we still need more levers more resource and more political will from national government to get us to where we need to be great thank you very much I think our key takeaway is that the strategy is to make Manchester even more fun exactly and that's the route to success stop the rain that would help I can only get so far who needs an economic strategy what you need is a weather strategy that was very subtle, do you see what she did there do you see what she did thank you Torsten afternoon everyone so nice to be here and see you all I was just going to talk about cranes for 15 minutes but then Torsten shot my thoughts and now I think it will be a rubbish thing I wasn't actually first of all thank you for the report for all of those that contributed I did get through all 111 pages on the train this morning and I think it is a really serious helpful contribution to the debate so it's really welcome that it's been published, it's really specific it's good to engage with and there's plenty of food for thought so fantastic that it has been published I mean in a sense I think most of us can agree on most of this right there's lots of good news out there lots of good things happening in this city region I was in Salford the other month and was seeing the effects of a 2014 housing investment fund that we set up with the combined authority it's a £300m loan fund I think it's true to say that not a single penny of taxpayers money has been lost but the money is now being recycled and is the development that is happening as a consequence of that is here in real life and making an impact and the 185% growth in the city centre population over the last 20 years and it's just massively impressive and I think huge congratulations and plaudits need to go to Manchester City Council to all the members of the combined authority to AEMON and his team and the mayoral team because it is a truly well run inspiring place and there's a clear mission here and tons of progress is also true that by the way I've never heard anyone say job done obviously not job done tons of work still to do maybe I'm sort of naturally an optimist but I sort of think the potential for Manchester and Birmingham UK's second cities for the UK as a whole is like discovering some sort of untapped oil reserve or maybe I need a greener analogy but you know what I mean, there is a massive opportunity here if only we could reach for it and make the most of it and I was really struck by the finding in the report that whilst it is great the productivity and growth rates in Manchester and the Greater Manchester are now outpacing London and it would take us 90 years to get to the same difference as Paris has with Lyon now that isn't good enough either clearly so tons more tons more to do what are we doing in the department and forgive me for being sort of bureaucratic about it and slightly in the weeds but actually the detail matters on this because I think on most of the high level stuff skills, housing, investment social policy we agree I don't think there is a huge difference in policy on us so how to take that to the next level on what precisely to do in March of this year we agreed the trailblazer devolution deals with GM and the West Midlands I think although it's always quite hard to prove these things but I think it's probably the biggest single transfer of power out of central government since either the devolution acts of 1998 or depending on how you look at it the legislation in 2002 that set up the Greater London Authority and what we are doing now is working through the detail and there is tons of detail to implement it to ensure that those powers are delivered I think one of the single most important parts of that is the single settlement bringing together a single fund for housing, regeneration transport, net zero and skills having done quite a few spending reviews in the Treasury it's not always easy dividing up the cake and so good luck colleagues in GM I'm sure they'll do a fantastic job but it's not hard but we think in the department that GM knows best how to use investment so getting that done implementing business rates retention and a whole number of growth zones so there is a greater degree of business rates paid in Manchester retained in Manchester I saw Vernon Everett this morning I'm just inspired by the B network I just think it's fantastic I think it looks great and who would have thought that the well many of us would have thought bus services acts would have had such profound implications but only now you're starting to see it really happen in real life and that is that is inspiring we're working really closely with our colleagues in the department for education department working pensions to what I would say is completes the post 18 skills devolution so most notably free courses for jobs and boot camps big deal and making sure that GM designs employment support programs they're all technical it's quite dry it's quite hard work but it matters in order for the city region to flourish the final thing we're doing which may or may not be of interest is investment zones which are place specific they are locally led we are not coming in from central government and saying your sector is this it shall be like that and the zones shall be A, B and C we are taking a lead from colleagues here and working with them and seeing how we can use central government support to try and make place based spatial policy work in this locality it really I hope to us anyway it feels like a partnership and to me that is the model of working going forward with the big city regions such as these great thank you very much well and then last but not least Jen can you hear me excellent it's lovely to be here talking about something that has probably preoccupied me one way or another for far too long both at my former employer and my current employer so as a journalist I was drawn to the line in the blur of this event that said that the rhetoric has outpaced the reality in Greater Manchester because if I was going to be writing something up that's probably what would be in the intro so I thought I would just begin by exploring that a little bit in my opening remarks I had a bit of mixed feelings I suppose when I read that phrase because I have I've got some sympathy with it but I also this part of me that kind of thinks that you need to put in perspective the progress that Greater Manchester has made over the last kind of 25 or 30 years so to perhaps begin with where to some extent I agree I mean I've lived and worked here for over 20 years and there have been occasions in the last few years where I have received press releases that tell me that Greater Manchester is doing the greatest thing that anyone has ever seen in the history of the world anywhere better than anywhere in the UK better than anywhere in any city anywhere and and then I kind of go outside and walk around and think I still can't get a bus from there to there still can't afford to rent there you know and so on and you know all of the things that we know are still yet to be sorted out or improved in Greater Manchester I think actually that that rhetoric has been a component of the success that Greater Manchester can say that it's had to date I think the rhetoric matters and I think that the narrative that's been sustained over the last 30 years probably in Greater Manchester has been part of the reason that there has been a growth a sustained confidence from the private sector and from central government governments of different stripes looking to work with Greater Manchester over that period so I think you can't kind of underestimate the importance of political language and also consistent political language for it to work it does have to match up in some way with delivery and with a clarity of strategy and a clarity of vision so you know historically in Greater Manchester you would be able to point to the delivery of the metro links such as we've got it so far and I realise the report talks about the fact that transport connections need to be improved but I'll come back to actually how difficult it has been to get as far as Greater Manchester has got to this point but that would be an example of something that the city region has managed to deliver going further back clear there's all the examples we know about the rebuilding of Hume the rebuilding of the city centre after the IRA bomb and more recently over the last last kind of 15 to 20 years the clarity of regeneration strategy in the city centre which I think has kind of provided a framework or a space into which the market has been able to kind of come in and flourish and achieve some of the things that you can see out of the window there have definitely been points in the last few years whether I've wondered whether that clarity of strategy and courage and delivery has been quite as clear or quick as perhaps it had been historically and I would kind of maybe pull out three things I don't necessarily know where for sure the metro link is supposed to be going next I know there was talk about Stopport there was talk about Middleton clearly Greater Manchester doesn't have the funding yet but you do still need to know where that money would go right if you got the funding so that would be one question that I would suggest and that is very clearly related to productivity perhaps someone in the room can tell me absolutely 100% where the metro link is going next but I don't think that's the case the artist formerly known as the Spatial Framework took a very very long time to get to the point that it is out now and of course only nine out of ten borys got there it was a very difficult political process and if the politics of planning was easy then our national planning system would not be in the situation that it's in now so I wouldn't underestimate the scale of that challenge but in the early days it didn't feel to me as though necessarily top priority and so it took kind of the best part of a decade from the devolution deal to the point that it has surfaced in its current form and I have no idea what the clean air zone is really I don't know how whether that necessarily relates back too closely to productivity but I think it's a good example difficult decisions if you're going to have a devolved system at some point do you have to be taken and so I think you know without which is not me meaning to be kind of overly negative but you can't get into a situation where you're drifting right because that is part of the reason that there has historically been confident in the city region clearly as the report acknowledges and as Bev has already said there's a huge role here for central government Greater Manchester is not going to be able to do all of these things by itself it hasn't done all of these things by itself you know some of the progress today has also been because it's worked in partnership with Greater Manchester and I completely agree with Bev that housing is the example that I would pull out as well Greater Manchester can't fix the local housing allowance problem on its own it can't fix the social housing building problem on its own it can't fix the national planning system on its own and those are all barriers to getting to where you need to be the housing pressures here I think are fairly well known already I've written something in the FT literally today about the fact that these pressures are not just being felt in the city but in the outline boroughs partly is sort of cost of living pressures have evolved over the last year or so so I've lost my train of thought can't think what I was going to say next but yes anyway housing so Greater Manchester does need I think this kind of constructive challenge that's coming through in today's report I think that one of the things that I quite liked actually about Turblaze deals which makes me a little bit unusual in this respect is that I thought it was quite good that there is a kind of clear outcome framework being applied to Greater Manchester in the West Midlands and potentially also a greater political scrutiny through some kind of select committee because if Greater Manchester wants to be treated as a peer by central government which I think should be the goal because local government in this country has a tendency to infantilise every area and you should also then expect the same level of challenge and scrutiny as a result I'm just going to rattle through a few bits of context and perspective I suppose which for me are kind of in defence of Greater Manchester yes there is clearly still a yawning productivity gap between where Greater Manchester is and where ideally it would be and I agree I don't think anybody's suggesting that it's job done I don't remember Manchester in the 1980s I do remember it in the 1990s and the scale of the change I think you can never reiterate it often enough the change has been absolutely extraordinary and the fact that it has taken as long as it has taken though to make that challenge is a testament to how difficult that actually has been if you take the development of the Metrolink for example there have been so many different permutations of financial mechanisms that Greater Manchester leaders have had to come up with over the decades to keep moving that forward it had to do deals with the Tories then it had to do deals with Labour then it had to do deals with George Osborne just in order to get each little bit of the network extended in order to get it as far as it has got so although yes there remain gaps I think even the fact that Greater Manchester is kind of holding steady as it were I think there needs to be some credit for that on places for everyone not withstanding what I said about the importance of insulting out our housing market here productivity and policy don't exist in the isolation from politics and I wonder how much appetite there will be among local authority leaders in Greater Manchester to reopen that particular kind of political worms I think my final point would be if we're using London as our comparator which the report is doing which it's perfectly reasonable to be comparing Greater Manchester to London because this is kind of the premise of what you know nationally the issue about regional inequality that we are over dependent on London almost southeast if we're using London as our comparator then I think it's also reasonable to ask whether there's a different way to build a city region to simply rebuilding London and if you only look at narrowing the productivity gap in isolation then you know potentially you risk recreating problems as well as the positives of the capital and I don't think anybody would want to see some of the problems that London has currently got clearly we would like to see the increased economic activity but you don't want to also do that so in many respects I think Greater Manchester is still a bit of a blank slate you know if you were going to try and build a city with a city region from scratch like there are an awful lot of opportunities here and an awful lot of political conversation to be had and I just don't think Greater Manchester should be scared to have them great that's brilliant Jim there's loads in there so let's try and come back to those as we go I thought in terms of how we're going to structure the conversation we've got about half an hour they remember to say you ask questions they're in the room if you're on Slido it's hashtag Greater Manchester so I thought we'd do a bit about where we're starting from and obviously we'll try to make it moderately controversial rather than just the easy bits sorry and then let's do who benefits which is where Jen finished it there so how do you have a city where you get the right outcome from that productivity growth not the ones that you might not want to happen so that's the plan so controversially it's all going with this everyone talks about Manchester going really well I was going to controversially but why don't you take this one it's okay but who's doing really well on productivity growth in Greater Manchester anyone? who's the winner Central Manchester itself no they're the levels but who is growth rate you do know the answer to this Salford Salford is the winner are we sure you're not being beaten with? I mean look if I think actually the starting point is different so there is I think a bit of a misnomer around Greater Manchester's economy if you look at where the baseline starts in terms of productivity and where you capture growth versus if you were to go back 10 to 15 years where we already had higher levels and I think there's been an interesting piece that's shown actually what does productivity look like over the last decade within Greater Manchester so I think it's fair to say and I'm speaking here as the leader of Manchester City Council that for a lot of the time there have been lots of measures places that Manchester have come from a lower starting point and risen more quickly through some of these mechanisms so actually if you think about how productivity spreads across Greater Manchester there was some reference of Trafford over there so if you look at places that have been places like Wigan areas that for some time have been operating at a fairly high comparative productivity level that's seen some increases and some great moves in Salford actually and if you look at their build rate within the last five years versus the 10 years before actually you're starting to see a significant change 10 years ago we have been talking about FDI into Salford in the same way probably not but the likes of Middlewood locks has only predicated on the basis of foreign capital but seeks benefit from the city centre so I think it's always the case where you're starting point and how you measure the benefit and I think this idea that Manchester as in the city of Manchester is the prime and only beneficiary where we see a challenge is the northern band and I think that's where we've seen a stubbornly low growth rate when it comes to productivity and when it comes to business growth and in that northern band I include the north of my own city so if I think about what residents in Charleston or Harper Hay in Manchester needs they need a strong Middleton and they need a strong Oldham just as much as they need a strong city centre in terms of places to go and opportunities that are available so I think it's a simplistic question to say who is the winner in Greater Manchester but the evidence is starting to suggest that this notion of traditional agglomeration that might just trickle down when we fancy it actually is a much more spread out version in Greater Manchester Great, very good Jen, why don't you do this one which is on the past so we don't know what's got us to where we are today if you've got to pick one thing that marks out why GM has done better than every other city region including London in the last ten years but every other city region over the 20-year period ending that decline is it the narrative or is it the transport or what's the thing that makes the biggest difference probably the thing underpinning all of those things that I would jump to is clarity and stability of leadership so then that underpins the message it underpins the direction it underpins the ability to have conversations and make deals that are accepted with central government it means that if there's a change of government or if there's turmoil at the top of government at least there is a constant going on here that knows where it's going and I would say that both from the political and the officer side as well like a clear idea of where you're going and roughly how you're going to achieve it so that's quite a kind of people make a difference having like leadership really matters well they do though because if you look at the opposite of that which is what we've had nationally is well closure is do you think that's not gone well for us if it doesn't feel like it it's not gone well for us I think it's institutions the establishment of the combined authority created an institution where there could be some leaders I think I think Jen's right and I think there's something around the political maturity of Greater Manchester so I don't know let's pick on me as an example coming in after my predecessor Sir Richard that had been in the job for 25 years beyond the slightly dodgy football analogies and the rhetoric about big shoes to fill you could have a natural temptation as a politician to try and recreate everything in your own image but it was important to the stability of the city that we maintained our original 10 year plan and we're going to refresh our 10 year plan for the next 10 years at the end of that original 10 year plan rather than just coming in and redefining that and I think that's the same across Greater Manchester the premise of Greater Manchester around the fact that we are a fairly visible geographic area that makes sense to people has embedded that decades of political maturity around some of those decisions that's a great answer and you definitely see lots of good things I spend my whole life on trains around the country lots of good things happening in lots of places in the country you don't see that in many parts of the country and that is a big deal but let's kick off on to the strategy on what we do so anyone wants to ask a question about what the economic strategy is again raise your hand we'll get your mic in a second so one thing that's we're aiming to make this so let's do the fun Manchester bit hands up in the room if you think Manchester is fun look at that you're so loyal I think the data basically does suggest Manchester is fun part of all the youth you've got but basically you've got a really booming tourism and leisure industry and that can be part of attracting people to live in a really successful city so you definitely want bits of that dangers in cities becoming tourism and leisure hotspots because tourism and leisure I said Norfolk earlier but there's some activities that can happen anywhere in Britain we've got lots of pretty places people can go and do tourism there we want that, I like that, it's good to keep going the countryside for example the countryside for example isn't going to host the highly productive activity that can happen in Manchester city centre and if you look at cities that become very tourism focus they are not high productivity cities they might be really fun cities Liverpool is definitely in this danger Bucket, Lisbon we've got some Portuguese members of the team Lisbon not been going so well recently traditionally the highest productivity bit but it's not seen any productivity growth in the last 20 years as it becomes a tourism hotspot you can still make money from it but it's not a highly productive place, it's probably not a great place to live the tension here between is GM strategy to be just really fun so everyone loves coming for a weekend here Liverpool kind of heading in that direction a bit there, where's Alan he'll tell me off in a second but anyway sorry Alan but basically, when people start writing including in the financial times that you can spend your weekend in Liverpool they've already run in Lisbon for the last 20 years but they're now writing in Liverpool then that will happen I didn't say you'd written it I didn't say they had many journalists I was just checking, I'm intrigued I've not read that one from you anyway, so why don't you how much fun and any dangers of fun because they all love it they just love it but I think as a key tenant of it being a great place to live that's the context and yes of course the evidence shows that as we grow Manchester is a reputable place to come so there's something around the buzz of a city make it enjoyable and when I speak to particularly large international firms that have chosen Manchester over other places to relocate to it's predicated on the basis of quality of life housing affordability the supply of talent but also a place that they would like to encourage their workers to relocate to regulation of Airbnb I think would help in terms of thinking in cities some of the issues around control over the sector and I think one of the things that we've done in Manchester as the first UK city to do so with some others quickly following is around using it's not quite a tourist tax it's using a business improvement district which essentially takes contribution from hoteliers with their consent and the reason that I mention that is that there is a temptation for politicians to ask off central government particularly when we talk about local tax-raising powers there is a temptation to think of a tourist tax as a solution to all problems but a tourist tax shouldn't be something that's subsidising a transport network it shouldn't be something that's subsidising a basic infrastructure it should be something based on additionality a fun place to live we're not in the market of attracting stag and henders for the weekend you don't want that, I've got some family in York it's dark on a Saturday night I just add something on that as well having a fun city probably part of graduate retention as well I'm probably a bit unusual of my generation that I went to uni here and stayed here like most people I knew left but actually it's much more common now for somebody to come to uni that's it, we're in about 55% of both Manchester University I just want to get a few more questions is it on the economic strategy so promise me, I'm high trust go Martin I'm just wondering how much difference it makes what we're producing there was a time when Manchester was leading in music in particular that seems to have faded drama those sorts of things, intangible that's a great question you were worried that we were like cultural leaders and now you've become bankers I can see that let's broaden that out slightly into this which sectors you did touch on this in your remarks in general when you go around countries and talk about their economic strategies in general what people want to talk about is which sectors they are going to focus in and then they always say the same things which is my place, wherever the place is is going to be doing digital, bit of finance biotech, it's going to be a biotech centre they always say the same things even if they don't know what biotech is and they've never met any business doing it they ever want to name the sectors and I understand that because political communication requires that one of the arguments of this report is that's a terrible way to make an economic strategy it's got one industry and it really needs to keep it because there's no other plausible route to success those that haven't been to Derby it's like aerospace and defence stuff but that isn't the case for GM the report argues that we want to just focus on the horizontal so not on some sector specific thing and it comes from a couple of things my involvement with the city goes back 2007, 2008 Richard Howard Bernstein, the Manchester pan economic review something I always remember from the beginning of that is that they had the list of strategies that they thought were going to be we're going to drive it and the problem was that when you actually look to the data didn't have a productivity advantage in any way I just think these sector targeted strategies are just too difficult you haven't got the political levers and you don't really know you don't really know where the strengths are and what you should do about it so I think that focusing on the policy levers that you can pull and then letting the people and firms that are out there make their decisions about what they're going to do at the margins it's fine to have sector specific bits of this and that it's fine for example if you think advanced textiles might be important for some parts of greater Manchester and I'm going to have a bit of the strategy which talks about advanced textiles I'm going to have a bit of the strategy which worries about what our R&D innovation spend should be on because I would like that R&D innovation spend to be moving us into more advanced manufacturing because that's going to benefit a particular part of the workforce I really don't mind having sector specific bits but I think they're marginal, they're not at the centre and I think that one of the dangers with the industrial strategy as we had it previously there was a distraction from mere and the shared prosperity review both which I was involved in was it started getting a bit sector specific by the way it's exactly similar to the point about tourism tourism strategy is terrible the conversation needs to be about what amenities you want because once you start having amenities you realise that it's not just about fun actually far more important than fun is whether your kids will get a decent education from your schools or whether your air is breathable these are about getting D fun yeah but that's really about the reports and parks so I'm not saying don't have fun but you want to think about fun as one amenity alongside a whole bunch of things that people really care about Jen mentioned the clear air zone I would be worrying as much about that as I would be about fun so I think I'm just okay very good this gentleman's really nothing on the like a bit of controversy I do like a bit of controversy I suppose the reality is that a lot of this we've had to bring businesses to greater Manchester and when you go and speak to businesses they ask for your specialism they ask of a politician what do you know about life sciences when I was traipseing around a biotech factory when they showed you precisely what it was in words I didn't quite understand they demand of places actually that high level information so I think when we focus on specialisms that's what's driving it the reality of doing business and I wouldn't want you to think that a great place to live doesn't mean that we're not expanding in the city of Manchester I just under 150 parks in green spaces and looking at the list 443 metres walk within every park in Manchester for every resident so all of this stuff is in the round so I'm not just a politician of fun no we're not doing that that's never been said about me in my life I'm taking it which bit was never been said? that you're a politician of fun right let's get a microphone down here a second while we give everyone a question Jen do you want to take this on given that you've raised your personal history of coming here 20 years ago and sticking when it was really fun when Martin was enjoying his kind of night clubs and his cultural youth your productivity cultural youth Martin the question from the interweb doesn't mean it's bad stop judging I'm just saying factually low productivity so the question is do local northern universities so let's just do Manchester want to keep it simple have the capacity to resources to train up the 180ish new graduates over this say two decades or basically is it going to be loads of people moving in well I mean I don't know off the top of my head what capacity northern universities have got I imagine it will be a bit of both it will be a bit of both and also do you know what graduates sometimes include foreigners often actually because whenever people say like people say it's zero summer across Britain they say the graduates here being productive then they're not being productive somewhere else so the country as a whole hasn't got richer you just move the people around which is like complicated it's not going into it but the reason it's not true is one because you can train up some more people and two foreigners exist I know it's hard to remember that but it's true sorry to keep it short and sweet the report doesn't do much on how central the universities are to great Manchester anyone walking around it nowadays would be like oh my god they're also driving the housing market in town as well right some of the accommodation that has been being built in the city centre over the last few years are very much catering to international students international graduates and so on and so forth and actually part of the pressure on the Manchester housing market already is the fact that there isn't enough space for the students that we that we need to accommodate which indicates that there is clearly retention happening and growth happening but maybe as a city maybe city region we're not actually keeping pace with that level of demand you've got to build some stuff guys right sir, give us your name as well Harry Fazie, Department for Work and Pensions I just wanted to know Henry touched on the idea of the importance of housing and how it must be kind of more affordable whilst private investment occurs is there a danger that private investment can outpace it in Manchester if the difficulties that will mention with a centralised idea of improving affordable housing over the UK is there this danger that visibly there's a lot of investment in Manchester it's quite clear to see could it lead to more clustering of deprivation in other areas like the other urban centres which people rely on in say North Manchester that's a really good question let's use that as our pivot to who wins loads of great questions there's only one for Bev on the strategy I'm going to come back to could we cock up the answer is yes we could many places have done that we shouldn't do it but the question for you from online from John Pearson is if you had 5 billion quids to spend you're not going to don't worry but this is abstract but if you did have 5 million pounds to spend what would you spend on basically what's the top priority transport, housing big shiny statues communists used to love it that's a good job I'm not a communist that's one of the many reasons it's a good job you're not a communist statues are the main reason like murder, expropriation other problems are also so I think thinking about the things that we're in control of now and sit within our responsibilities then actually transport because there is a significant gap between where we want to go and get people to versions of reality at the moment and I think housing is certainly up there in terms of the ability to subsidise affordable housing that isn't currently there in terms of capacity and it's worth saying that and that will require central government there's no way we're seeing significant increases in social house building in Manchester without things why don't we turn that then to you and then we're going to move on to who benefits on so the single pot one money which I'm slightly worried we've mentioned it a few times even used the word trailblazer which sounds exciting but I bet I'm not sure everyone knows what it is I'm kind of working on this as a job and some bits of this that aren't very clear so on the single pot so someone's asked Beth what would she spend the money on really going to stop having a view on how money should where money is spent in Greater Manchester have on your accountability framework with some objectives for Greater Manchester to achieve are you going to be able to cope with the chillaxing no longer having a view well I think it is worth a moment's context on the local government finance settlement where obviously there's always a debate about the quantum but the local government finance settlement largely as you'll know spent on adult social care children's social care and other forms of pressures is in the order of £60 billion a year and here the single settlement is much smaller amount than that but what my point is we trust local authorities to deliver an awful lot and they by and large do it very very well in some very difficult circumstances so Cymru central government trust the Greater Manchester combined authority to know best on the precise splits between retrofit housing skills and transport in which years then yes absolutely it should and we're happy when people so let's not talk about GM because that will get like personal awkward they will love GM but like you've done this for you're doing this for the west midlands and GM at the moment in theory other places would like the same deal right west Yorkshire even south Yorkshire now what if someone just makes terrible decisions do you promise to stay chillaxed they spend all the money on the statues is central month you're going to then say we've marked you against your accountability framework and you are not hitting your productivity or other targets it's sub optimal but are you going to stay chillaxed so we will publish all the detail shortly on exactly how the settlement will work do you think I don't want to read all this bollocks about parking stuff no no no this is this is hard and it obviously not to ten I reckon it's going to be I think you're going to stay ten is really chillaxed I reckon we can get to seven and then when something really bad happens you will fall out I think the local government finance system is quite a good comparator right I mean it's a slight red rug can we please time to discuss the local government financing settlement because they're going to kill themselves at the back and Ben's going to lose it as well and then bad bad bad who wins we're massively over time but you don't always get what you want so we're going to do who wins I don't want to finish it earlier housing is a really good way into it because Henry showed you that chart showing that housing makes a massive difference to the productivity gains will feed food to wage gains I think we should be confident about that crazy neoliberal there's not many of them left anymore there's not many of them left but in general we should be confident that Manchester gets more productive wages will rise for most of work incomes won't rise for everybody why not because not everybody works for lots of very good reasons but their housing costs will rise in line with productivity is housing the biggest problem on the who wins or is there another one you want to highlight for people? no I think housing is the biggest problem on who wins Jen said it which is that the really difficult decision is how do you do this stuff without recreating the problems of London there is a really brutal answer to that which is that if you just viewed it from a national strategy point of view you might not care I'm just saying you could say well actually London is paying for all these public services and it's fine it's terrible for people who have really poor housing outcomes and low prices or whatever but Manchester is so important to the national strategy of Britain that we should do it anyhow that would have to be a very cunning city the way you do it anyhow is just not to build any housing and you allow the market to price poor residents out now personally I think that's terrible just to be clear so please don't take the first part of that without the second there is a reason why I have been campaigning for planning reform and the need to increase the supply of housing including building on the green belt in London because I think that is the only feasible route to doing it so I think it's a choice but I do actually think the housing is absolutely front and centre and the analysis shows that if you don't do the housing the real income gains at the bottom are probably negative because you are as Jen said recreating the problems of London so I think we've got a choice we should try and do something that offers GM enough powers and money that we can do the housing stuff alongside the other stuff that we are going to do because I think the other route is just not conscious however you said that thing that's what I'm here for now what I'm impoing that is that what the report is basically arguing for is that central government needs to cough up the cash, the investment for the capital sides of this and the local leadership needs to embrace the change because it is a lot of change that Manchester would go through Greater Manchester would go through and the deal is empowered leadership with the resources to do it or should be to deliver the transport, to deliver the housing to make it a success that isn't just recreating London and in exchange you need the empowered leadership that basically because that politics of that is hard so one thing I was going to say is we did a whole weekend here as a derivative exercise that's the team here and one in Birmingham going through with residents so we had lots of time talking to these kind of people we did a whole weekend with residents on what they wanted what they thought about this, the likely path of plausible growth which was great and full of loads that's what the video you saw at the beginning was from now without going to all of it the big discussion was a deep ambiguity about thinking that the status quo low wages compared to lots of the country fewer opportunities for young people coming through in some ways wasn't great and it would be better if it went good but then a lot of nervousness about what people would use in a quality or poverty I'm going to come back to that in a second because those are different things worrying that it makes that kind of thing worse so my final question to wrap up on the winners and losers from all of this maybe we can let you off answering this because it's not fair because you'll have to say both but the most likely scenario for a more productive Manchester assuming you build the housing which will have to at some point not just be in Salford of Manchester but will have to be in Trafford and other places that are refusing to build it you will have to but let's assume we do all that so the politics has overcome people decide they want that because they've met someone called young people at some stage then what's most likely to happen most likely is that inequality is slightly higher you've got more rich people rich-ish people we might do but it's unlikely but you will have more higher income people compared to the country as a whole they're the people that will work in these kind of offices and there are many of those in northern cities at the moment they're very equal places even though they don't feel like that because you've seen the cranes but poverty which is about the level of income right at the bottom is likely to be lower because your employment rate will be lower your wages at the bottom will be higher and if we've done the housing right you haven't pushed down so prosperity is higher everybody's a bit richer inequality people looking deeply confused inequality has gone up a bit because everybody's got a bit richer but we've got more rich people in the city who are currently living somewhere else like abroad or London or Buckinghamshire wanting to kill themselves but poverty is down because you have raised the income of poorer households it just hasn't gone up as much as the rich households now I would say from the deliberative exercise people are obviously they have no idea what I just said but they are reasonably but people are ambiguous about that and the thing that's marked Manchester out so far is that it goes to your narrative point which is like there is a vision it is basically to get that and lots of other cities they don't have that and the leadership is a bit like oh god like I can't possibly think about that it's really scary I don't want the prosperity because if someone says that inequality is going to go up at all it doesn't mean that will definitely happen the more houses you build the better central government coughs us up for the social housing do it that will also help but probably you end up with higher inequality and lower poverty our view is that's a good deal that's the deal worth having because Britain needs that poorer people in greater Manchester the North West needs that but some people won't like seeing some yuppies on the streets I mean I don't like seeing yuppies is it worth the trade up? but I think historically Manchester has been quite a magnet for sort of Cheshire set Wales footballers pure cringiness coming in here we're kind of used to it how are you on it? you are allowed to answer because you're not running for office do you want the deal? do you want the higher inequality but the lower poverty? good you're in for the deal see look she answered the question no one ever answers this question that does help I think I kind of need to be running to be allowed to do it so it's a political question but I don't know that you quite the trade off is quite as here we go it's not really a choice though is it? it's not really a kind of take it away from one another the way I think about it is is it the most likely outcome from adopting this strategy yes so should you be content with that being the outcome rather than some people would literally choose that just don't go for the prosperity keep you in a quality down everybody's basically a bit poor but I'm happy with that some people will definitely say that of course we should go for prosperity and productivity in Greater Manchester and be mindful the whole time about the impact that has on the entire city region I think that is possible for policy makers to do great do you want to speak into this issue? indulge me for a second so we talk about consistency of leadership and we obviously give ourselves credit to Greater Manchester as politicians but if the public didn't buy into that that wouldn't be a popular narrative we would be able to maintain the reason the public in Greater Manchester and the city of Manchester, if they didn't like growth they would kick Labour Party out at consecutive elections and we wouldn't have 88 out of 96 Labour countries on the city council the bit that's important is that actually they wouldn't brag but there's a serious I would just say it's ridiculous the serious point is that you have to be sin to be striving to do both and the reason that I give it's underplayed the role of civic pride, my residents don't elect me to go abroad and say hey do you know what guys 44% of our kids live in poverty it's really grim in Manchester we're trying our best they have at least politically communicated to them opportunities and hope for the future and I'll just throw in one stat we haven't had the benefits of the London challenge program in schools which saw significant money flow from government into schools what we've had 13 years of austerity in this city and for the first time we're now able to call it a trend that consistently, year after year our kids, the sixth most deprived local authority in the country are achieving at above the national average and above the north west average that's the first time in the city's history and that's because we perhaps live in a country where the social contract is no longer clear but you build that social contract with your residents that says we will try our very best to reduce poverty we will also do that by increasing prosperity and we'll never forget all of the social stuff that we have to do in between so as a Labour politician in the city that Manchester you have to go after both that's very good and that's really important one thing that did come out from the delivery of exercise was that next generation thing they were happy about the higher inequality people would use the word poverty but they meant but they never described themselves as that they were worried about the city but they were really keen on the the next generation will have more opportunities because the city had those opportunities they didn't just move away all the stuff so that was definite, I should have said that that was very clear let's do a vote amongst the punters that's you and then we're going to wrap up so who is for no more growth in prosperity but we don't get the yuppies so inequality doesn't go up anyone one of you is, you're lying someone must be in favour of it, no? we did this in Birmingham last week the majority were for the no prosperity none I did at that point lose my rag you haven't recorded this this is recorded, yes transparency is important accountability and transparency are really important the majority voted they were so nervous about the higher inequality they did not want the prosperity let's let you vote who wants the prosperity and the future generations having a chance in exchange for a few more yuppies there you go that is what success for a city looks like it won't just be fun it will be better on that happy note can we all thank the panel for their thoughts today for coming if you've vaguely enjoyed that or traumatised by it but we're launching the entire economy 2030 inquiry final report it's a massive book, got to write it in the next months we'll see you there, thanks a lot everyone have a good day, go and build a great city