 yoga?' Doyou know that you can't change human nature, you know anyone that's coming in now sits at the front it is going to get socially awkward otherwise? Right. Welcome everyone we are going to start because we are late and that my only job is start on time, finish on time, so 50% fail. My name is Torstan Bell, I'm the chief exec of the resolution foundation. You are very welcome indeed today to this joint event the resolution foundation and the greater Manchester combined authority. We really exciting to meet every person need every person. We're very excited to be here. If someone had told me, we were going to be in such a nice room with loads of really great art on the board, then we'd have opened up Resolution Foundation Manchester office and we'd be here every day. It's very nice and it's really great to see such a large turnout, especially when it's raining and it's quite late, but that is what free booze will do. So thank you all for coming. In terms of the plan for today, now obviously anyone focusing on economic policy making a'r mynd i gyd yn rhan iawn o'r bydd yn ei fodol ar y cyflym. Mae'r ffaith yw'n amlwg am gallwn y cyflym ymffriddat ffordd 14 yr wych. A i gyd yw'r pethau o'r gweld ei wneud yn llong. Mae'r bydd ynnynt i gyd, ac mae'r bydd yn mynd i gynnig i'r gweld eich bod yn ystafell ifanc ond mae'r bydd wrth fynd o'r iawn o'r ffit paibll gwleidiaeth. Mae'n dweud gallai y diogel oherwydd y gyrraeth na'r ddyddi'r cyffredin taeth. fourty-years of high un equality and gives you a country that struggles when hard things happen on day. I'm sure we will touch a bit on the short term stuff today butWre also trying to bring back us to the big picture whichHow Does Britain and the UK as a Whole succeed in the 2020s and What's Greater Manchester's part in that. That's the overall purpose for todays event. To help you do that you have great power of speakers. First First of all, you're going to hear from Lindsay Judge, who's a research director at the Resolution Foundation. She's going to take you through some of the content from Stagnation Nation. Has anyone got a copy? Hold it up, someone. There we go. That gets some more downstairs. They're free there, because there's no lunch, but there is free books. Actually, I'm going to take you through some of the highlights of that, but particularly in so far as it relates to questions about how Greater Manchester fits into the potential for a new economic strategy. Then you're going to hear from Diane Coyle, who doesn't really need much introduction here, but runs the Bennett School in Cambridge. It has done loads of great things, but it's also, as far as I mean, you keep saying yes to helping Greater Manchester out with things. So I'm going to list all the things, but all of them basically for the last 15 years, and it's going to launch. This is free as well. Also free and also excellent, which is being launched today. The Greater Manchester Independent Prosperity Review update on the evidence base. Please do read it. I was reading it yesterday, and I learned a lot. Even though some of you might think you know everything about Greater Manchester, I bet you'll learn something useful for it. So have a read of that, and then I'm going to go down the panel. You're going to hear from Bev Craig, leader of Manchester Council, but who also leads up all the economy work for the combined authority. Then you're going to hear from Louie Corwell, who runs the LEP, and is going to tell us about how we're going to have an economic strategy for Manchester that trumps everything else in the world. And then we're going to hear from Henry Overman, who's a professor of economic geography at the London School of Economics. And despite having London in the title, he does love the rest of the country. So you mustn't boo. Now the job for all of you guys is, we have quite a short and sharp session today. So go on to Slido while we're doing it, put your questions in as we go. Slido is a website, and if you need Wi-Fi to get on to Slido, it's art gallery public. You see what they did there, it's free, totally free. Log on to the Wi-Fi, go on to Slido, the hashtag is greater Manchester, put your questions in there and vote on, because then we can get going straight on with the questions when you've heard from the speakers. That is the plan, everyone. So, Lindsay, kick us off. Thanks very much, Torsten, and it's lovely to be here. I have the easy gig tonight, which is I have to summarise a 150 page report in about eight minutes, I think, and I'm going to try and do it in about eight slides. So let me start with the problem statement that Torsten has already set out for us, which is what we're essentially looking at in the Economy 2013 inquiry, which is that we've had high inequality in the UK, and we have since around about the 1980s, and we have low growth, and we've had particularly parlous growth since the global financial crisis compared to our competitor countries. And that is a toxic combination if you're interested in living standards. And that's what this first chart is showing you very, very clearly. So, to just explain what it's doing, it's showing you how the bottom, red bar, the middle, the median, the blue bar and the top, which is the kind of greeny coloured bar of the income distribution, perform in the UK relative to the countries that are on the X axis. So I won't spell them all out to you, but I mean, obviously the big stand-up finding here is that in Norway, the bottom 10% of the population in terms of their income distribution have 60% plus more income than the bottom 10% in the UK, which is an absolutely staggering figure. And you can read off the graph and you can see that that holds true for many of our competitor countries in the OECD. There are a couple that underperform us, but clearly those are not the ones that we would be interested in emulating. So what we've been doing in the Economy 2013 inquiry is thinking really, really hard about how do we tackle these long-term endemic structural problems? And I'm going to cut to the chase here and tell you what a huge amount of work has basically driven us towards, which is that we could change that, but if we want to change that and if we want to develop an economic strategy, we have to play to our comparative advantage as a country. And our comparative advantage fundamentally is that we're a service superpower and this chart proves that point very clearly. If you look at the export of services, we're just shy, but the next one down from the United States of America, this is where we really shine as a country. And I think it's really important to linger on that because of course it's not just a question of where we are now but where we've been in the past. And if we look back to say in 1989 we can see that the things that we are outputting and that we were good at then, we're generally good at now too. And that suggests that there's a certain stickiness in terms of your kind of economic model that is very hard to buck, so why not sort of play with, go with the flow and go with the trend there. And that is a relatively, well, it's not relatively, it is a good thing for cities. Because we know that if you look at what a service-oriented economy looks like, it will be spatially complicated and concentrated. This is a very beautiful chart but it's somewhat baffling, so I'm going to take my time and describe it to you. What's it showing us? Well, what it's showing us is the further you move towards the right-hand side, the more productive a place is becoming. So this is showing us gross value added per worker, so it's basically telling us that as you move towards London and Paris, you can imagine you're becoming more productive. And the size of the bubble is telling you how many workers there are in those places. So of course what we really want to see is lots of big places, a long way down that axis. Lots of people to be in highly productive places. You don't need me to describe to you what we are in the UK. We're an economy that has a superstar city, which is London, which is a function of the fact that we're a service-driven economy. But our second city's generally lag. They generally quite poor performing against London. And we've highlighted Manchester there and you can see Manchester sort of sits somewhere in the middle of the pack when it comes to productivity. It doesn't have to be like that. And I would point you very clearly here to the example of France. France is another of a good comparable economy to the UK actually in terms of its industrial mix. It's also quite service-heavy. It also has a superstar city, it has Paris. But its second cities are much more productive than our second cities. And you can see that. You just need to look at Lyon, you need to look at Toulouse. They're outpacing Edinburgh, which is fundamentally our second highest performing city in the UK. So it gives us hope, if you like, to think that being a service-driven economy, which will generally mean that we'll see these agglomeration effects in cities, you can be better than where we are today. So how do we get there? Well, I think one of the big lessons from the economy 2030 inquiry, and I'm leaning very heavily on Henry's work here, so apologies Henry if I get anything wrong here, is closing those productivity gaps takes an awful lot of effort and an awful lot of inputs. So there's a very interesting thought experiment in one of the reports that we did over the last year, which is thinking about what would be necessary to get Manchester much closer to London, to close the productivity gap between London and Manchester to 20%. It's not currently much larger as you just saw. The first thought is, well, how much investment would you need? And the answer is here. So currently Manchester has investment of £109,000 per worker. To get it up to the productivity of closing the gap with London, you'd have to get up to £142,000. So it's about a 30% increase. It's an absolutely extraordinary increase in investment levels that would be required. Another way you can think about it is, of course, you can think about the human capital. Manchester has far fewer graduates as a share of its workforce than London does. You'd need to increase Manchester's graduate share to 48%. Almost half of the population in Manchester would need to be graduates to decrease that productivity gap between Manchester and the capital. And another function, another way you can think about it, is to think about the number of workers you'd need. And one of the things that's really clear from the economy 2030 work is that you'd need to grow cities in a really substantial way in order to get those productivity gains and that the numbers here speak for themselves, I think. So we shouldn't be kidding ourselves that this is a simple task. This is not about sort of business as usual and kind of ticking along. This is about a sea change in the way that we think about economic development and the way our model needs to be set up. And then the other thing I just wanted to highlight before I hand over to Diane is that there's clearly, this isn't all about upsides. There's a huge upside to improving productivity and balancing out some of our regional gaps. But there are some real downsides too. And the one that was most striking, I think, we've done some qualitative work as well as lots of quantitative work over the last year. But one of the most striking things was the pressure that growing cities and becoming more productive and more prosperous would place on housing. This chart showing you the change in local authority house prices by pay over the last 15 years or so. And I mean that the upward slope is basically telling you that the more pay you have in an area, the faster the house prices rise. You get this kind of wedge opening up fundamentally as cities become more prosperous between their house prices and those of less prosperous places. And that is not brilliant if you're not on a great income to begin with in that city. And it's also not brilliant if you want to move to that city, which is really important because one of the things we've just talked about is we do want people moving and we do want mobility improving. So tackling the issues of housing along as an integrated part of a growth strategy is incredibly important. And then the second thing I want to highlight as a kind of potential risk is who gains from these opportunities. This is a chart we produced in another one of our reports when we were looking at Yorkshire and Humberside. And I think it's really fascinating. So again, let me explain just what it's showing you. What percentage of people leave their local authority, so outward migrate from their local authority at certain ages, so the ages along the x-axis, and it's contingent on whether their local authority is deprived or less deprived. And the standout here of course is what happens around 18 or 19, which of course is a critical transition point for lots of people. And you can see that if you live in one of the least deprived quintile of local authorities in most affluent places in the UK, almost half of young people leave at that point. And I think we can speculate quite clearly that they're generally leaving for higher education. If you look at the poorest quintile, which is the red line, that's around about 16, 17%. So we're doing something that means that young people from our poorer areas are not able to leave, are not able to get educational opportunities, and are not able to benefit from the opportunities that exist, and we hope there will be more of them in the future. Let me draw this to a close. So what are we saying fundamentally in the economy 2030 report? We're saying we should be building on rather than embarrassed by the UK service specialism. And that is really key to national prosperity. And it's also the basis for turning our levelling up rhetoric into reality, because it demands us putting great cities centre forward. It requires that. That is the nature of the model. So it's there in its essence. But it does bring huge challenges, huge challenges when it comes to investment, when it comes to prioritisation, when it comes to human capital. And we need to be really honest about that, and we need to be honest as well about that there are genuine downsides and there will be genuine losers from this process. And how do we protect those losers in the best possible way? And as the slide says, the goal is clearly to navigate that tension and to raise national growth and lower inequality between regions without pushing it up within regions. I want to go back to something that looks like my first slide and think, well, what is the price of this process? Well, the price is absolutely enormous, actually. So this is a slide which is thinking about what would incomes look like in the UK across the distribution if we could perform as well as five sort of middle-ranking comparative countries. So Australia, Canada, France, Germany and the Netherlands have reached out. And this is saying, well, what would the impact look like on incomes if our income levels went up? And basically, you can see it's around about 20%. If we could match the performance of those countries just on our growth levels, we'd see incomes go up by 20%. Would it look like if we could redistribute in the same way that they do? Well, again, the picture is very clear. There's real gains, especially for those on lower incomes. If we could have the same levels of inequality as those five countries, this is what it would look like. But put them together and this is what it looks like. So it looks like gains for everyone, but of course those gains are very much for people on the lowest incomes and also at middle-income level. So the price is very significant. The challenge I don't underestimate. Well, actually, Lindsay, over to you now. Well, I'm going to inflict just a few more charts on you. It's always a pleasure to be asked to do an event like this. I was involved in the Manchester Independent Economic Review back in 2008 and I grew up in Ramsbottom. So any excuse to come and talk about the future of Greater Manchester. So we had a very distinguished set of panellists on the review and we've got this refresh now and I'm just going to share with you a few of the insights and the refresh, but please do read the whole thing and we've got maximum five minutes to talk to you now, which if you've had enough charts already you might think is plenty. So we did this original prosperity review ten years on from the MIA and the idea was to refresh the evidence and understand how priorities and needs in Greater Manchester ought to change. But the basic message was that the thing that matters is, and it covered these seven areas and I'm skipping through these because it's all in the document, the thing that matters is productivity. Now economists talk about productivity all the time and what we mean is for the resources that we use, all the resources, what output that's valuable to us do we get out of that. And that's very different from what some other people mean when they talk about productivity. Some people mean it's cost cutting, how can you get the same output but make it less costly to do and increase your profits. Engineers talk about it in a sort of mechanical way if you like that you're thinking about the volume of things that you can get out or the volume of inputs. For economists it's what you get out that people value. So it's a bit different and the reason it matters is that all of the improvements in living standards over time that we've enjoyed, longer life expectancy, better health, all the amenities that we have access to, warmer houses, all of that has come about because of productivity growth. And before we had productivity growth which came with the Industrial Revolution, driven by this great city of course, it was a subsistence existence for many centuries. So that's why it matters and it's why we harp on about it. If we want higher wages, we want better quality jobs, we need the productivity. Now there's a bit of good news in that recently Greater Manchester has done a bit better on productivity than the rest of the UK. But the gap between cities is still very large and actually that's cold comfort because the UK as a whole has been doing really poorly in terms of productivity. It has basically flatlined since around 2007. It's called the productivity puzzle because we don't really know why it's happened and there has been a slowdown in lots of countries with global factors going on, but we're doing worse than others. So this is good news in a way, but there's also still a huge productivity challenge. Somehow managed to break the computer. This is not very productive. There we go. One of the things that I want to highlight is the importance of health in all of this. It's part of what economists in our usual poetic way call human capital and it's very closely linked to labour market outcomes. One of the pieces of research carried out for this refresh found this staggering figure 75% of variance in employment rates across the parts of Greater Manchester could be accounted for by health. Now that's very high and other studies might find somewhat different figures, but the basic point is that health does really matter. I'm going to show you a chart on inactivity. This is adult inactivity in 2019 and 2021, and you can see that across the boroughs it has increased. This is a national picture. In other countries, inactivity went up during the pandemic and then it went back down again, and so we've got a lower unemployment rate but high inactivity in other countries that we would compare ourselves to inactivity has gone back down to where it was before the pandemic and that hasn't happened here. It seems very likely that ill health is related to that. People are not going to be able to do challenging and high-skilled jobs or challenging and quote low-skilled jobs if they've got a bad back or a hip replacement that they are on a waiting list for or they are affected by air pollution and have asthma. All of those kinds of issues that we know are so unequal across different parts of the city region and other cities too. It's a real dimension of inequality that matters. That's one of the focuses and maybe that's something that we can pick up on. Unemployment, quite a varied picture across the boroughs. The national rate is quite low. You can see that it's gone up in some parts of Manchester in particular. That coincides with skill shortages. There's something that's not functioning very well about the labour market. We might be thinking about what are we going to do about the skill shortages and in all kinds of jobs, progressing people's skills, creating lifetime opportunities, responding to changes in the economy and changes in technology. That's another of the challenges. The transition to net zero. The chart comes from the Grantham Institute at the University and the dark part of this shows what carbon emissions ought to be in Greater Manchester if we're going to get to the target by 2038. The pale colour shows what's been spent so far out of that budget so that requires some adjustment. That's not easy because it's hard for any city to do this by itself. It's part of a national and a global picture. I want to add there are other parts of the environment that really matter and that link to the health points that I was just making. Pollution kills. Transitioning to electric vehicles as quickly as possible and cycling and walking as much as possible. It's going to be good for carbon. It's also going to be good for health. Let's think about the pollution as much as we think about the carbon. Access to green space. City centre parks are really important. It's important for people's health, for the clean air, for mental health, but also because it's an immunity that brings in and attracts people with high skills and retains people with high skills who might then find the city a better place to live. So there is going to be more follow-up research. There are challenges and Lindsay started highlighting some of those. There are choices to be made. If we want to step up, have that higher productivity and higher living standards that go with it, that means there will need to be more housing, for example. So there are questions that come along with that. So thinking about the trade-offs, this is an evidence review that helps think about those. I'm sure there will be more updates coming from the team over time in terms of what they're monitoring. But please do read it and I hope we can pick up on some of those points in the conversation. Thank you. Great. Thank you, Diane. You've had the national economic strategy. You've had some of the inputs. Right. You've smashed it in exactly the right time. We're at the end of the slide. Smash it all. By the way, people at the back who've been craning their next to see those slides, you get a lot of prizes. But also that's what happens when you don't see it at the front. Crime leads to punishment. It's important lesson to learn. That's the national picture. That's some of the evidence base for the local picture. You've decided to become the person responsible for leading Manchester and large parts of Greater Manchester. Just as we emerge from the pandemic, what's the answer bit? Well, it's a million-dollar question, isn't it? First of all, I begin by welcoming the reports that we've seen today. I think what it does for us here in Greater Manchester is demonstrate, I suppose, the longevity but the success that can come with having a longevity of vision. I think particularly at this time when it feels that there is so much uncertainty, not just economic uncertainty, but uncertainty across all spheres that I've actually been able to talk about long-term plans in some ways is really quite refreshing. And that's without me making any governments and the government of the day. But I think, so from my perspective, there's a few things in terms of context for me that's really important within some of this. I'm leading the city of Manchester but also leading across GM on economy, business and international. It's something that I get to see in terms of the strengths that we have in our city region. And I think that goes back. It goes back to the depths and maturity that we have here in Greater Manchester about recognising that some of the dangers we're saying now, about just talking about growth without understanding what that's rooted in, what creates growth, but also what kind of growth that you want to see and who benefits from that growth is a really fundamental point that should drive any kind of economic strategy that you would and I think that that's really cannot be overstated at the moment and in Greater Manchester we will never take a position that is simply growth at all costs, that damages our communities and leaves people behind but finding a way of being able to harness growth to make sure that people have opportunities but also that we create a thriving place that we want to see. So for those of you that follow us closely, you'll know that Greater Manchester has recently launched its refreshed economy and in that essentially tries to give many many solutions to much of GM's problems but the reason that we're here today is that we want to use some of this as a touchstone as we begin to refresh our local industrial strategy that we have in GM and the timing of it actually could never be more important. You know I've been in elected council now for well over a decade and in that iteration we've had iterations of powerhouse we've had you know discussions around levelling up we've now got growth locations and having a clear economic vision and economic plan that talks about how you create a greener fairer and more prosperous city region has to be fundamental to that. So there's a couple of things just that I wanted to specifically draw out and I think the first thing will be around the context that we find ourselves in the moment and the impact that will create both for our communities but also for our economy and that of course is the cost of living crisis, the cost of doing business crisis so with every punchy headline you like to give it but ultimately what that also shows is that actually structurally in places like Manchester and Greater Manchester we've had some serious problems for a long period of time that we'll be grappling with when we talk about our economic strategy. So in the report you'll see referenced some data analysis that's done on the basis of 2019 Mosaic Experian data that talks about household income in GM. We delved into this in the city of Manchester a little bit deeper so those not afa with our really exciting administrative bindries, the city of Manchester comprises of 600,000 people to GM's 2.8 million. So of that 600,000 people we did a calculation on the basis of people's income. For the data geeks amongst you kind of the weakness in this is it assumes to adults and to children the demographics of a city like Manchester we know our families are much bigger than that. But we looked at what happens when you pay on the basis of your income you pay your rent, the average rent you pay average energy costs on April 22 prices and you also pay your average food bill at that same time and we find that over 22% of Manchester residents had less than 30 quid a month. Exposible income after rent after gas and electricity and food to live on. We find that that goes up to 46% when you look at people who have less than 124 pines a month to manage that. That's getting yourself to work, that's getting your kids to school, that's paying for uniforms that's paying for broadband, new phones washing machine breaks. So actually the real stress is that our communities feel to me has to be that fundamental driver of when Manchester and Great Manchester talk about growing our economy. We talk about productivity, we talk about attracting new businesses and investments it has to be firmly rooted in the values as to why you're doing that and what you're doing that for. And if you think about the growth that we've seen here in the city a population growth of nearly 200,000 people over the course of 20 years we've radically reshaped what that skills profile looked like. So back in 2004 nearly a quarter of our residents had no skills qualifications at all. That's now 6%. We have one of the highest graduate retentions in terms of cities across the country at over 50%. So there are some strides that have been taken that require long term approaches and some of the clear focuses that we've given around are key areas of growth in terms of, you might jazzily call them frontier economies if you're an economist you like to read lots of lengthy documents but those highly skilled high value which is quite a problematic term to sectors have been at the forefront of how we've talked about our economic strategy in this country for much too long. But what about all the other stuff what about the things that look after your mum and dad, look after your kids before they go to school where you go to buy your food where servicing the economy is something that's quite fundamental that's something in GM that we've been quite keen not to lose sight of it won't neatly fit into a productivity box but in terms of functionality of society is vital and that's why some of the work that we've been doing are on the likes of the good employment charter the works that we've been doing with the real living wage where there are 500 businesses in GM city region that are already accredited and we're asking many more to come on that journey is not losing sight that actually you can go after the long term prize of having a more equally distributed balanced regional economy that has high productivity that has high growth and contributes to the overall UK economy but you can also look at what you do to support everyone else that functions in the economy and I'd just say three brief other points around the connectivity of other issues when we talk about jobs skills and work and health is fundamental obviously the health foundation have released a report that's shown direct impacts that devolution can have on life expectancy at a time when the rest of the country was going backwards here in GM we were able to deliver that the need to have more affordable housing in a way that we'll be arguing for even more powers through devolution but we're already cracking on in delivering council and social homes here in the city and across GM and then of course transport so obviously much has been made around our cap on fares ability to put money right into people's pockets when they need it most but not losing sight of some of those long term discussions with government that we need to have about structural capital investment into our infrastructure in this country they would see not just high speed too but really northern power high rail and investment in the capacity that we need to be able to enhance our public sector so this is really welcome I think it's a really important time but it's also really important time to reassure people that actually much of our original aim despite the flavours of the day hasn't actually shifted there's clear focus around how we achieve that and when I in that phase were actually able to show some of the fruits of our labour in terms of what we're delivering for the people of Greater Manchester now you're going to now you're going to hear from Lou who is not only the chair of the left that has set up and run an actual real life business it's very exciting tell us all about it Lou I'm only 23, I just like this way because I run a business so I'll maybe just add for the purposes of stimulating hopefully a bit of debate because it would be really interesting to make the most of the people who are with us today for some challenging questions around the business perspective on that and with the caveat I am an economist by trade so I'm not in a Disney world a bit about opportunity and hopefully a bit of hope so as you say I founded a business in this city 25 years ago I think safe to say anybody who's running any kind of business or an SME has never had a moment like the one that we find ourselves in I was looking at some data the other day that took 50,000 businesses that turn over about a million quid and make about 90k profit as they went into the pandemic survived the pandemic come out of that if all costs stay the same and just energy doubles they lose on average about a quarter of a million pounds a year so that's 300 plus thousand businesses that possibly disappear so an extraordinary moment of challenge which we described the other day as 99 problems and inflation is just one of them this crazy and leaders are tired people have run a business in a pandemic there's not a lot to draw on both financially and morally but we're largely a tenacious bunch so I'm sure we'll do our best but I think this extraordinary moment of challenge and then in that what the pandemic brought which was 10 years of change in 10 months so we were going to go through this transition and many of the economic changes and the transition of our economy towards green jobs and all of those things we knew were coming we just thought we had a much longer period to kind of adjust to it so I think where we find ourselves now as an economy is actually we're in a really important moment of clarity and ambition and making those decisions about what we do next and in a sense the responsibility of some of the conversations that we're having and some of the work is to stimulate that strategy and that thought and give ourselves the best chance of achieving that stage of the ambition I think for us as we will always do we'll play to our strengths and I think we're quite clear actually on where our distinctiveness is aside from as Beth said probably the most politically stable part of the UK which will take and allows us actually to take possibly the exception I'm not putting out the S&P's got like basically 99% We'll arm wrestle them for that position but I think that that opportunity actually to plan long term and do what we've always done but we're definitely at a moment where how we drove growth for the last 20 years is not going to be how we do that for the next 20 so I think but that's an opportunity right and I think the vision that we have for the kind of growth that we want out of the next 20 years is as better that works for all people and for the planet and we've set that out quite boldly I spend a lot of my time on the front line with the people who might bring the money and the jobs and looking them in the eye and trying to understand what it is that they want understanding those people Honestly the most heartening thing is that I think we're at a point where that's not going to be a choice that's detrimental to our economic growth it's massively advantageous because I think the pandemic has changed people's values it's changed businesses relationship with its employees it's changed businesses ambition in some cases it's forced business to change in some cases business leaders now genuinely value a different set of success measures and I think Greater Manchester is uniquely positioned because we believe those things and we've stood on those orders for a really long time so it's an authentic story not one we've plucked out of the air to offer those kind of organisations a place and an opportunity to work with our citizens and to work with our local economy to grow their business and grow ourselves in a way that we can be proud of that does work for everybody so I think from my perspective I will always say if you're going to be in a crisis this is probably the best place in the country to be in one because we are having meaningful conversations about how we take that forward but I think also in terms of a unique proposition if we get that proposition right that has massive advantages for the UK economy because we're going to be the only place that can offer that and a place for inward investment to turn up and find a home that shares a value set so I'll probably leave it there Thank you Lou so as you can see Lou is quite perky which is how she's managed to run a business for 25 years Henry is an economic geographer now that isn't their natural starting point Henry over to you I mean let me start by saying how nice it is to be back here Torsten's joke about me being London based aside this is the 15th year for me of being involved with trying to formulate economic strategy in Manchester first with the mirror then with the independent prosperity review maybe that means nothing to you so here's something else I tried and failed to move my family here in 2012 for reasons that I won't go into I like Manchester so let me just highlight three things maybe so the first thing which I think is a message that is clearly coming out in the economy 2030 stuff that Lindsay presented but is also very clearly coming out in the independent prosperity review refresh that Diane talked us through you we've got to do something about both growth and inequality okay I really think the key messages you've got to think keeping about both there's no point having growth if it's at the cost of massively widening inequality I don't know think 45 pence tax rate cuts um but you also can't tackle inequality the sort of major investments that are needed without growth so we have got to have something that does that hits at both and I think that the economy 2030 is grappling with that as a people here in GM the second point I want to make is just about sustainability because I think that's crucially important I mean let me just raise one challenge here I don't personally understand why any local area would have a decarbonising target that was much faster than the national target alright and I'm happy to go into the reasons for that let me do the more positive thing I think the crucial thing from a GM perspective if it decides to stick to that target is that it doesn't miss the opportunities that come from investing in the green economy and doing stuff that will drive down carbon emissions elsewhere and generate jobs and opportunities here and I think there needs to be as much focus on that as there is on decarbonising because I think both are crucially important for reaching sustainability the third point I wanted to make is you know I obviously agree with Lindsay's assessment that we're a service superpower and the crucial part of the UK's economic strategy is about making sure that cities outside of London can grow quicker the thing I think that we're in danger of dodging is that I don't think that's lots of places I think that's probably one or two being realistic and I think the big question for Manchester is that being a world city requires being a lot bigger being a lot more high skilled lots more investment and I think it's a question of whether or not GM wants to step up to that and stepping up here is does it have the appetite but it's also does it have the powers and does it have the strategy to both deliver on growth and as Bev rightly says make sure as many people as possible are able to engage in the opportunities that you know that would generate so I think that's my third point and let me just finish with a fourth and then open it up to discussion with what's going on at the national level what GM and other local areas decide to do is going to be more important than ever and so it's crucial that we get it right and reports like the two we're launching this evening and events like this are a part of the mission of making sure that we do that very good thank you Henry that was pretty perky actually if we all can define our stereotypes now I like being in Manchester and you like being in Manchester that's perked you up but you didn't manage to move here still time Henry, still time right now we've got loads of great questions coming in just to remind you it is hashtag greater Manchester because we're all very imaginative there's loads of really good questions we've got about 50 minutes what I'm basically going to do is try to blitz through as many and you're going to have to give proper answers proper answers what could you have okay very good so let's take a let's take these in chunks so there's a few so let's do first of all let's do services so there's a few questions which I'm going to try to bring up on the screen here if I can make the right we're going to come up on the screen I'm going to read it while I wait for it to come on the screen because we're a low productivity here we go oh my god it's worked right okay is the UK actually a service to compile or is it just financial services doing all the work but there's a related one to take at the same time if I can go and make this work here we go which is basically finances useless we should stop it now why don't we this isn't quite saying that but it basically says that no so Lindsay or Henry Henry do you want to do this from there we didn't grapple in the inquiry but this is quick it's not just financial services we have in fact anything it's increasingly not financial services we have really good strengths across a whole range of service activity so it's not this is not just a story about financial services in fact if anything I would personally be with the it's the other stuff that I would like to see as expert and if you don't like financial services don't worry because we've just had a massive financial crisis and we've left the EU so don't worry they're going to be hammering our financial services for years so focus on the other stuff like design or universities you've got two service sectors sitting on the panel those of us are from think tanks or from government artist parasites on that right now it's never panel with us right now what about is one on for you Bev which is again I can find it which is basically here we go the most popular question so you're going to have to answer it straight you can't see it so I'll read it out the government's new local growth strategy being nice calling it that is a low tax low regulation investment zones taking the offer as red I mean if you've managed to read it and understand that you've done very well because I think you've got to submit interest in like tomorrow with no details of the policy anyway basically can you make it work for GM what are you going to be deregulating low taxing or what are you going to snaffle out of this basically right so I begin by saying that I'm not a big fan of the hunger games and it feels like interacting with government recently it's been a little bit like hunger games so I think we've all learned our lessons of levelling up look I'll be really honest the clarity so far around investment zones is pretty pretty weak I think for me there are some clear red lines in Greater Manchester that we are going to be really quite clear about when they actually let us at the moment it's a form and the form says are you interested do you want to have a chat the answer is yes we're interested we'll have a chat but we've got some things that we're not very comfortable or happy with and things it will say now on that basis so for me in a city like Manchester to not be going anywhere near any of the planning stuff that basically can't blanch the lies people to roll in and to work against what we have in terms of master plan strategic ready regeneration framework stuff around environmental commitments we've been through the pay in of places for everyone for quite some time we've come up with a plan so if it doesn't fit to that we're not interested we won't accept the rolling back of employment rights and what we're not keen for in Greater Manchester is to take from team side to give to Rochdale that doesn't work for anybody but where there could be an interest and this is where chatting to other city leaders across the UK is it if we're talking about something that is a more thought through version that's an expanded version of what we have with enterprise zones then actually there are some opportunities in there and there are some localities within GM that would work so we've said that we're interested but show us what you've got we'll put forward our growth locations on the basis that we already have a plan but we've got some pretty firm rules and we're not afraid to say no so does that mean we'd like the lower tax bit but not the other stuff it depends because when you say lower taxes it depends who pays the lower taxes and where it goes the problem that we have and this to me explains the last decade of challenges but particularly exacerbated in the last two or three years is the competitiveness between areas so we've had it with local authorities we've had to do beauty pageants for quite some time show a bit of luck, get a bit of money and celebrate because the other city didn't get it you got it the risk is and that's where I smirked when you say strategy because if investment zones are actually the strategy around economic growth and nothing will grow things will become displaced and that's the risk that we have to see so I don't actually think it's about taxation it's about consistency across the beast very good, it looks to you to answer the question people that's what you see now, Diane why don't you take this one which is a big picture so Greater Manchester is currently negotiating with the government on more devolution what's your top ask to combat the stagnation we've talked about what would you want to hold I think the very top would be some hint of strategy strategic thinking being long term from the government and particularly in funding and we're asking businesses to make investment decisions that have at least a five year horizon we're asking individuals to make investments in their own training that have long term implications for their whole lifetime earnings and career and the government changes its plan all the time so we got the growth plan it was the plan for growth a year ago and the industrial strategy before that it is an absolute joke so just some consistency over time and particularly in funding things like transport you can't fund you can't plan short term but I was a school governor for many years we didn't learn our current budget until half way through the current fiscal year and as governors you're supposed to do a five year financial plan it's just an absolute joke so that's my top ask so long term financing basically is the top I'm also a school governor we are going bust so don't get me in charge of your anyway your finance is right Lou why don't you take this one as the representative of the world of businesses if I can find it here we go so you run a service business the question is why do we think services are downplayed in UK economic strategy and policy and would a clearer focus on it actually help here's another way of putting it even the local ones obviously mainly the national ones but even the local ones they basically often say a pop version of the problem with Britain is it's just about banking and the answer is it should be about manufacturing but that is basically what they say despite there being what was it 8% of the workforce is now in manufacturing so it's like ruling out 92% of the workforce so why do we say that if you accept that caricature of what politicians say which obviously you should obviously one we have a bit of a punch on for making things so things we can touch and feel but I think from a GM perspective and many other city regions up and down we've made a decision quite a long time ago whether we called it industrial strategy or whatever we called it that actually we had some very clear priority sectors that we wanted to grow in to create long term sustained growth that was evidence based and very considered and the service economy has a part to play in that even if you're looking at science tech there is a service economy around science and tech that is very important but is not as central as the organisations generating the R&D and the IP without those there is nothing to service so I think I think we do downplay it but I'm not sure and I can say this can't hide that I think we should continue to downplay it slightly because I do think actually the long term growth around science and technology as one of those examples around health innovation around the things that we've identified here as being critical they're the right things to be backing and if you take a very long term view which is we should be doing the things that the machines can't because really in 20 years that's where the jobs will be there are vast components of the service industries that will be done by machines if you look at legal services if you look at consultancy services AI will do a huge amount and automate a huge amount of that so it's quite a dangerous long term strategy to be in a place that isn't around original thought and original IP and original creativity we should do things computers won't eventually be able to do Now, but if here's a hard one for you that I'll give to you and to Lindsay which is about whether you want the middle aged basically there you go the first one it doesn't say that there's a virtuous virtuous cycle of London drawing graduates in and then it's a vicious cycle for other cities because many older professionals move north from London but how do we how do we get we don't want the middle aged ones how do we attract more young professionals what can Manchester offer over London how do we stop the sicko brain drain and there's another one that's related to this which if I can find it is at least funny here we go which is pro midlife in an aging society to build productivity we need to make more of financial social human capital of people in midlife that's me, yes how well positioned so basically how are you going to get the young or the middle aged there's no oldies in this I'll be nicer we are a city region that's world-renowned for our older person's strategy and recognised by the UN in doing so so I'll play to all my audiences look I think I think we're on to something in Manchester I'm not just glibly talking about the three time articles that said Manchester is cool and hip and it's a place to go or the economists international ranking that put Manchester above London in the global liveability index the top UK city but I mean I could go on but I won't in the interest of time but there's something for me that there's key components as to what attracts people but also what makes people stay so I came to Manchester from Belfast for uni all of my mates went to London I realised oh I could get a better paid job in London but then I realised oh I lived in city centre in Manchester in a nice two bed apartment or I could go and live in a high share with six people in his own four for three times the price because there was a challenge with jobs so I think it's jobs and opportunities not just graduate retention but career progression it's about homes and communities and places that people want to live but also we've gone big on culture the factory international is opening next year say what you like about a local authority choosing to build a project that's going to cost over £200 million we have had government grant and subsidy in that but that's part of Manchester's cultural offer that recognises you can build loads of flats you can create lots of offices but actually if the quality of life isn't good you need to tap into that and that's something that isn't just a Manchester city centre thing that's something across GM places like Rams Bottom are thriving speaking to the midlife audience particularly people citing the relocation of the BBC but that to me gets the nub of where you can have a city you can have thriving places around it be it some of the fantastic stuff that's happening in Stockport at the minute we're actually there harnessing the affluence of their population by creating an offer that keeps people there so create good quality places but keep the jobs there to retain them and some of that does it for itself but then some of it does need the very confident articulation as to what's happening in an area when somebody might have left us 20 years ago and thought that a fancy night out to the Dutch pancake house so the world has changed I mean I loved, I loved there's nothing wrong with that some of the best friends are in the pancake house right, Lindsay just a slightly bigger perspective for the UK as a whole people moving around, midlife youth, what do we want? well I think I think Bev's sort of hid it really right that in some ways it's a bit baffling as to why lots of Londoners don't come and live in Manchester when you look at the housing costs we know that the differential housing costs in the machine when it comes to mobility I mean if I may speak about something from Yorkshire in Lancashire which feels very dangerous I mean we did some really interesting qualitative work as part of the first phase of the economy 2013 quarry talking to people about their place and what kept them there and what would make them move away and one of the things that was really striking was people talking about the quality of their city centre so I think this speaks to what you were just saying Bev about amenities and there was a real sense in lots of places that if your city centre or the kind of physical space your public realm was kind of hollowed out or degraded then that wasn't going to draw either you or indeed more money into the city centre and that was a real problem and you ended up in a vicious circle in this case where you had the degradation feeding through to exodus feeding through to people not coming in and spending more money so I think that there's a lot to be said on the housing side, there's a lot to be said on the amenities side but of course at the end of the day it is fundamentally about jobs Right, one question each then for Henry and then for Diane before we wrap up Henry, the first one for you and I'll bring them both up so you get a warning Henry, why shouldn't regions set more challenging net zero targets, you meanie and then Diane yours is education skills which we haven't touched on human capital much but basically how to improve education across GM boroughs, human capital and productivity gains when we talk about attracting high skilled highway jobs how about we get some home grown if you've talked about it a lot before so Henry first, can't we decarbonise Greater Manchester to solve the planet I'm going to preface this by saying that I think net zero is hugely important I recognise all the issues etc it's just that things that GM does will be swamped by Trump if he gets re-elected there you go now we're getting depressed or China or other bit and it's for me it's about where are you going to spend you're operating within a fixed funding envelope so where are you going to spend the marginal pound and if I was GM I would be spending it on things at lower pollution so in that space I would be spending it on parks and things at lower pollution and things that really deliver a direct benefit to GM residents now some of those things overlap like better insulating homes where it's hugely important for people in terms of the cost of living crisis and just how warm their homes are and livable but some of those things don't and if I face something where the choice was between doing something that benefited the local population versus something that did something to help you achieve some 2038 carbon target I would do this in the benefit of the local population so I think attracting high skilled workers to a wonderful city and growing high skills within that wonderful city region are not mutually exclusive things you can do them both and there are some things that we do know about how to improve educational outcomes you start early you do spend money the London challenge involves spending money but it also involves sharing best practices across schools so it's not that there's no knowledge about how to do it but it's a long term thing and actually I think it's much more likely to happen somewhere like here than it is at the national level when it's all about the next tweet stop tweeting people last question to them for Bev as our representative of the people so let's take these as a no pressure that's democracy let's trust is also a representative of the people actually that'll teach you you can't be half, you can't be pro some democracy people take it when you lose even with Donald Trump right so let's take a set of these for you Bev which are hard so first of all with the GM's spatial strategy struggling to deliver housing growth she's going to say it's not totally struggling but with the GM strategy struggling to deliver loads of housing growth does GM actually want to can it grow to be a world city or are we just pretending basically what are you going to do about planning barriers for the people's powerhouse who says does economic growth have to be achieved by gentrifying I think that's in the pejorative sense of gentrification of Greater Manchester's community or is there another way forward so those are quite big pictures to wrap up on so basically what are you going to do do we want loads of change in growth or is it going to be a disaster right well it's not going to be a disaster I think I'm here to reassure you no look I think there's a couple of things for me so I think there will be pace and the reason that we went through the painfully slow planning process as part of places for everyone was to get the balance right of things that we were comfortable with so there is a reason and there are trade-offs to be made that much of the density will come particularly in the city of Manchester so we will see more supply added to Manchester city centre that will cover some of that growth of density as part of that there are a number of key challenges though and it speaks quickly to the trailblazer a question before of levers that we need within our control to be able to do the things that we want or need so the rented sector has gone through the roof since the government capped LHA and there is now only one ward out of 32 in the city of Manchester where average rents are beneath the local highs and lions we need to be doing something pretty urgently about that because that's creating a massive drain on our ability to influence within the highs and stock in some of those sectors the second is around housing we have an ambitious target at GM around a number of social homes that are zero carbon that we were built we've just built the first zero carbon zero carbon social home in East Manchester it was expensive so actually the ability to deliver that will require capacity that are levers from government that are capital funding and that will engage more closely with our piece the private sector low carbon achieving its scale to be able to do it quicker and we are already on site on a number of those but the final point and it comes back to the crux of there is always a tension around what does growth get you and who is it for and I think of all of the places that I go to when we talk about that and we talk about the narrative we have in GM we know that we have to grow our economy if we are to be a successful city region precisely because of the points around opportunities around jobs and that will mean there is a growing population that doesn't mean it always has to be done as a gentrified approach and I would say that one of the debates that I have and discussions I have with some of my London colleagues political and otherwise is that in areas without Brianfield sites you have to knock something down to build something up but in a place like Manchester and across greater Manchester we have so much vacant land and that's why starting with a Brianfield first policy does precisely that building new things in places in GM will help solve that and the final thing I'll say in the city of Manchester we've got one of the lowest home ownership rates across all of GM and across all of core cities every day I speak to people they tell me they want the security of owning their own home so just because we built something that's shared ownership just because we built something that's low cost to go to market doesn't mean that it's an expensive option so we're building kinds of houses we're building social homes we're building shared ownership and we're building for low cost sale and it all has to be part of the solution We're going to build it's not just going to be gentrification No but when you grow a population and you keep people from university you're keeping an income bracket and the city centre 600 people lived in Manchester city centre at the turn of the last century that's grown exponentially and much of our growth will come in places where people don't already live and that means that we're able to work alongside and make sure that if you're growing up in Ardwych if you're living in Moss side if you're living in Cheetham Hill actually you've got agency and ownership to be able to make sure that we're not just a denticate building the same things with the same Starbucks and the same corner that have the same offer that are bloody expensive you need to get a balance within that that works within your communities Great thank you very much We're going to wrap up there so can we all so thank all of you for coming and just to plug the free books downstairs and the latest production from the Kamal Authority thank you for the hosting We haven't finished yet Wait a second I was just going to say we need more of these conversations because it's good to join up the National and the Local sometimes and also it's good to have a bit of hope Have a nice evening run go go go