Mythic Manchester: Devo Manc, the Northern Powerhouse and rebalancing the English economy

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1 Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society 2016, 9, doi: /cjres/rsw004 Advance Access publication 8 April 2016 Mythic Manchester: Devo Manc, the Northern Powerhouse and rebalancing the English economy Graham Haughton a, Iain Deas a, Stephen Hincks a and Kevin Ward b a Planning and Environmental Management, University of Manchester, Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9PL, UK, graham.haughton@manchester.ac.uk, iain.deas@manchester. ac.uk, stephen.hincks@manchester.ac.uk b Geography, University of Manchester, Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9PL, UK, kevin. ward@manchester.ac.uk Received on June 16, 2015; accepted on February 3, 2016 This article examines the prominent role of Manchester in recent devolution debates. The so-called Manchester Model for city-regional governance has been based on developing a tradition of close collaboration amongst neighbouring local authorities, allied to a highly strategic approach to building alliances, the development of a strong if selective evidence base and an intellectual agenda inspired by agglomeration economics. Drawing on 35 interviews with key actors in Manchester and surrounding areas we reveal how the Manchester Model has been carefully nurtured over a long period, drawing on agglomeration economics to argue that Manchester should be seen as England s second city. This article critically examines this process of case-making. Keywords: divergent cities, northern powerhouse, Manchester, agglomeration economics, geographical imaginaries, economic imaginaries Introduction The cities of the north are individually strong, but collectively not strong enough. The whole is less than the sum of its parts. So the powerhouse of London dominates more and more. And that s not healthy for our economy. It s not good for our country. We need a Northern Powerhouse too. Not one city, but a collection of northern cities - sufficiently close to each other that combined they can take on the world. (George Osborne MP, Chancellor of the Exchequer. Speech introducing the Northern Powerhouse in Manchester, 23 June 2014). 1 This is the best opportunity in well over a century to level the playing field between north and south. Not by dragging London down, but by firing up the rest of the country. (Patrick McLoughlin MP, Transport Secretary. Speech in Leeds, 5 June 2015). 2 Since its emergence in the summer of 2014, the aspiration to create a Northern Powerhouse economy has come to embody the UK government s strategy for devolution within England. Underpinning the concept is a desire to rebalance the national economy, alleviating growth pressures in London and the south-east while also addressing the long-term economic The Author Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Cambridge Political Economy Society. All rights reserved. For permissions, please journals.permissions@oup.com

2 Haughton, Deas, Hincks and Ward difficulties of England s principal northern cities. The term Northern Powerhouse was initially associated with George Osborne, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, but has since entered wider circulation as a form of shorthand for the government s strategy to devolve increasing powers to the city-regions in the north of England, based on what is presented as Greater Manchester s pioneering, exemplary experience. In late 2014, an agreement was announced for central government to devolve substantial new powers and budgets to the Manchester city-region, covering transport, housing, planning, business support and apprenticeships amongst other matters. In return, city-region leaders agreed to the principle of an elected city-region mayor. Fiscal autonomy would be enhanced by the devolution of newly generated revenue from increased business activity to the city-regional authorities, the outcome of protracted negotiations as part of the agreement of Greater Manchester s City Deal. The 2015 Conservative Party manifesto included a commitment to devolve far-reaching powers over economic development, transport and social care to large cities which choose to have elected mayors (Conservative Party, 2015, p.13), including a historic deal for Greater Manchester (ibid. p14). The Conservative Party s election victory has seen these commitments begin to be enacted. The Cities and Local Government Devolution bill was introduced into Parliament in May 2015, outlining statutory powers for city-region mayors but also, importantly, detailing arrangements for a broader range of local authorities beyond the major cities to bid for Combined Authority status, each working with government to broker a bespoke devolution settlement (House of Lords, 2015). Welcome though the new enthusiasm for supporting the north of England may be, in this article we argue that it is rooted in a form of decontextualized economic theory that uses abstract economic laws to develop problematic policy prescriptions focused on the assumed potential of large cities to generate growth. These abstract models serve the interests of large cities rather more effectively than they explain the reality of how actual economies work, not least given the evidence that economic growth rates are higher in many of the smaller cities of the UK and elsewhere in Europe (Centre for Cities, 2015; Dijkstra et al., 2013). Nonetheless, accounts that privilege large global cities as generators of economic growth have gained influential backers (World Bank, 2009). Such accounts have been used to justify shifts in the allocation of public expenditure, focusing support less on need and more on potential, to the benefit of cities such as London and, more recently, Manchester. Unsurprisingly, this trend has generated considerable concern about the concentration of public spending in the largest cities, not least in the context of a current devolution settlement that has so far favoured London and Manchester over other English city-regions (Allen 2015; Hollis 2015; Inman, 2015). For the most part, representations in the media of the Northern Powerhouse and its Manchester strand, now widely known as Devo Manc, have tended to be positive, viewed in some accounts as an exemplar of cooperation between central and local government in the interest of both cities and the national economy. Whether by accident or design, a broadly accepted narrative has emerged in which local leaders in Manchester put aside their parochial and political differences with each other and with central government, and were granted extra powers in return (see in particular Jenkins, 2015; also Localis and Policy Exchange, 2009). This article provides some support for the basic elements of this narrative, but also suggests a parallel, more critical reading of the emergence of the Greater Manchester model. Our research involved a programme of 35 interviews conducted over the period with senior 356

3 Mythic Manchester politicians, officials and private sector actors in Greater Manchester and the surrounding areas. Interviewees were selected from those who had been prominently involved in regional and city-regional debates in the North West over the past two decades, including three present and former leaders of local authorities who had also been active in city-regional affairs in Greater Manchester, senior officials involved in regional government, city-regional governance and in local authorities, plus leading private sector actors who had been prominent contributors to regional and city-regional debates in the North West. We deliberately chose to include interviewees from outside Greater Manchester in order to provide insight into relationships with surrounding authorities. Big, denser, better: cities, urban hierarchies and the construction of theory-based policy All too often, economists treat their subject (societies based on markets and wagelabour) as if it could be defined by immutable laws, behaviour and tendencies. This is certainly true for the kind of economics which wins Nobel prizes (Lipietz, 1992, p.ix). Providing something of an antidote to the pervasive influence of neoliberal thinking about how markets operate, there has been a recent resurgence of critical scholarship based on Karl Polanyi s work on situated economies (Hess, 2004; Jessop, 2001; Polanyi, 1944; Peck 2013a, 2013b). In The Great Transformation, Polanyi used historical analysis of the UK economy to reject the view that markets should be seen as the long-term dominant economic organisational model, his work in part framed as a reaction to the influence of the work of Hayek and other Austrian economists who defended the market as a spontaneous order which had arisen independently of government and with which government should not interfere (Gamble, 2009, p.46). Polanyi, by contrast, argued that economies were always embedded in society, and markets were a construct of real cultures and societies. Drawing on Polanyi, recent work on ideational embeddedness has argued that all markets, including free markets, are embedded in theoretical assumptions, societal rules and institutional structures and arrangements (Block and Somers, 2014). Starting from a similar premise that economies are culturally, socially, institutionally and politically embedded, there is a need for an analytical framework that contextualises how the relations between market and state operate in substantive economies. Rejecting the idea that pure markets and pure states ever exist, substantive economies exist only as complex hybrids of states, societies and markets, where markets operate as dynamic and variegated hybrids of multiple modes of coordination involving competition, exchange, redistribution and reciprocity. In situated economies, rather than work to universal abstract economic laws based on an idealised market utopia, actors make choices balancing competition, growth, cooperation and redistribution. It becomes important in this context to understand how economic models are developed and the performative work these do in legitimising particular forms of knowledge over others (Christophers 2014a, 2014b; Mackenzie, 2006). Economists can act as agents actively engaged in experimentation and manipulation of markets through the projection of their own frameworks (Callon, 1998). Extending this premise, Miller (1998, 2002) has revealed how certain economic frameworks and their associated models have become so potent that they are used to legitimise the transformation of actual economic practices to fit the abstract assumptions of the models themselves (see also Mackenzie, 2006). In the case of neoclassical economics and its neoliberal mutation, this has included the normalisation of the view that markets are somehow natural phenomena and that attempts to control them are therefore distortions, likely to engender inefficiencies. 357

4 Haughton, Deas, Hincks and Ward However, there is nothing natural about how various well-funded sources, such as those that underwrite economic liberartarian think-tanks, have invested in various forms of lobbying in order to position neoliberal theories at the fore of political debates in the US in particular, but also in the UK (Haughton and Allmendinger, 2016; Peck 2008, 2010). Rejecting the view that markets exist as natural phenomena and that to understand how they work requires the search for abstract, universal laws of economics, our approach is to see markets as social formations that exist only in relation to the social worlds they inhabit and help shape. Specifically, it is important to understand markets and market forces not simply as out there natural phenomena; instead, competing conceptions exist about how markets work that can be mobilised selectively to advance particular forms of statecraft that shape policies in favour of certain interests over others (Peck et al., 2009). Drawing on Jessop (1997), the state itself does not exist as a separate entity with its own agenda, but instead constitutes a mutable abstract space shaped by the ways in which diverse actors compete to steer state strategies in ways that privilege certain ideologies and interests over others, and certain state spaces over others. Recent work on cultural political economy provides further insights into these processes of transformation and their intellectual underpinnings, highlighting the importance of economic and spatial imaginaries in the shaping of state spaces (Brenner et al. 2003; Jessop 2012a, 2012b). Taking this work forward, there is a need to understand better how new state spaces, such as city-regions or indeed the Northern Powerhouse, almost invariably invoke new spatial imaginaries that seek to influence public and political opinion about how future economic growth can best be nurtured and its benefits distributed. New imaginaries can be mobilised to recalibrate both how we understand past economic performance and envisage future possibilities (Jessop 2012a, 2012b). In the later years of Keynesian welfarism, for instance, economic theory involved imaginaries such as rust belt regions or deindustrialised cities, and the development of solutions that drew on alternative imaginaries such as growth poles or clusters. Many of these imaginaries have, however, been subject to critique. Allen and Cochrane (2007), for example, highlighted the incoherence of many of the geographical imaginaries employed in a long succession of urban and regional strategies for South East England, noting the disjuncture between imagined and institutional boundaries, and between normative visions of future administrative geometries and the messy reality of local economies. In a detailed critique of the changing geographical imaginaries that have been constructed for London over recent decades, Massey (2005) argued that recent variants have focused on London s status as a global city within an international economy of flows. In this potent imaginary, ensuring that state strategies support London s ambitions to be a global city is portrayed as critical to national wellbeing, requiring that efforts to narrow interregional spatial disparity or address intra-urban inequality should not jeopardise further growth in the capital. Any attempt at national spatial rebalancing, in other words, should not be at the expense of London. The new urban economics and new regional economic geography have provided the intellectual rationale for this reimagining of how a small group of global cities propel economic growth. Both draw heavily on agglomeration economics to explain why certain types of cities and their regions are said to be best positioned to drive forward growth, while also helping to rationalise the divergent economic trajectories of cities as a product of undeniable market logics that favour large urban areas over smaller settlements (Haughton et al., 2014; Martin et al., 2015). To summarise an extensive and diverse literature briefly, the argument is that economic growth in recent years has tended to 358

5 Mythic Manchester concentrate around larger, densely developed cities, reflecting their concentration of positive externalities, such as diverse labour pools, lower transaction costs and untraded interdependencies (Overman, 2013). The existence of negative externalities such as rising land and labour costs is acknowledged, but these are typically seen to be containable, principally via supply side efforts which include large scale public infrastructure projects and further liberalisation of already open and flexible local labour markets. Championing large cities in this way involves a strategy of state spatial selectivity in which policy and regulatory support helps to maintain and enhance the dynamism of a small number of large urban economies whose pre-eminence is attributed to market forces, as different fractions of capital seek those areas best able to generate high returns. Public policy, it is argued, needs to be refocused to help such cities realise their potential, rejecting inefficient redistributive alternatives. While concern is invariably expressed about the social costs of spatial selectivity and the resultant dilemmas this presents to politicians, the view is that unbalanced spatial economies are an unavoidable but manageable outcome of markets behaving naturally, allocating resources in the most efficient way (Overman 2012). Some have sought to question this orthodoxy about the need to concentrate support for economic development to a greater degree in the largest and most dynamic urban economies (Parkinson et al., 2015; Rodríguez-Pose and Fitjar, 2013). In Europe at least, there is evidence that large cities are not the dominant engines of growth suggested by the new urban economics (Dijkstra et al., 2013). There has also been concern about the effects of focusing on the largest urban areas for those living in smaller cities, towns and rural areas (Harrison and Heley, 2015). Nonetheless, in policy terms, the global city imaginary remains the dominant framing for spatial policy in the UK. Given this context, for city leaders whose administrative boundaries are tightly drawn, as is the case for most British cities, reimagining themselves as part of larger city-regions is helpful since these larger geographies help provide evidence of critical mass in terms of population and economic activity. Local policy elites in Greater Manchester, for example, have been particularly assiduous in presenting their city-region as the UK s second city as a large counterpoint to London, complementing the capital as an engine of national economic growth. To summarise, our analytical framework conceives of economies, states and state spaces not as natural pre-given formations, but as constructed, imagined and contested entities. How policy-makers and politicians come to understand divergence across cities in this reading rests on the ways in which certain social forces construct and favour particular framings of economic performance in order to influence state political-economic strategies. Our theoretical framework then suggests the need to question taken-for-granted assumptions about how economies work, developing instead an improved understanding of how particular models of economies and markets come to be inserted into policy debates in ways that privilege certain groups of actors and certain types of area over others. Theoretical sifting, scalar fixes and the politics of pragmatism The broad outline of successive approaches to city-regional governance in Manchester has been well documented (Deas and Ward, 2002; Deas, 2014; Harrison, 2014). Following the dissolution of the Greater Manchester County Council in 1986, the ten remaining unitary authorities formed the Association of Greater Manchester Authorities (AGMA) to coordinate on a voluntary basis a variety of non-statutory areas of joint work. This arrangement has continued to develop, with each district authority paying an annual levy 359

6 Haughton, Deas, Hincks and Ward to fund AGMA s work. This culture of joint working is generally accepted to have been stronger than in the other former metropolitan county areas outside London, encouraged in part by their joint ownership of a major asset, Manchester Airport, and a growing reputation for successful interventions at the city-region scale, perhaps most notably the development of the Metrolink tram system from the early 1990s. Over the course of the 2000s, a number of reports generated by consultants and think tanks argued for greater economic and political autonomy for Greater Manchester, based on what the city-region had achieved through AGMA and its potential to contribute further to national economic performance (e.g., Marshall and Finch 2006; Westwood and Nathan 2002). In 2009, the Labour government agreed that Greater Manchester, along with Leeds, would become a pilot for new statutory cityregion governance. The Coalition government elected in 2010 opted to dissolve the apparatus of regional governance inherited from Labour, but remained committed to the development of city-regional institutions and policy. In 2011, the Greater Manchester Combined Authority (GMCA) became the first city-regional authority to receive statutory recognition under the new approach. Initial powers covering economic development, transport and skills training were extended from 2014 to 2015, as the city-region continued to fulfil a role as vanguard for government s wider programme of experimentation in devolved governance and enhanced fiscal self-sufficiency. Harding et al. (2010) attribute the success of the Greater Manchester city-region model to a combination of cohesive local intergovernmental relations and a culture of collaborative working, a long-standing pragmatism in respect of the engagement of local business and central government by local political elites, and incremental institution-building that was able to sustain collective political support. Other accounts have emphasised the importance of political stability in the core Manchester local authority, alongside visionary leadership on the part of a cohesive grouping of local political and policy elites led by Sir Richard Leese and Sir Howard Bernstein, Leader and Chief Executive respectively of Manchester City Council throughout most of the period over which city-region initiatives have emerged (Jenkins, 2015). This broad interpretation good governance based on strong and stable leadership found support from the majority of our interviewees. One interviewee summarised the importance of the lengthy gestation of cohesive relations amongst local political elites, which underpinned an organic process of institution-building that predated the more recent central government interest in city-regional governance: Over time there was developing trust and understanding between the districts...they ll have their differences and they ll have their different point of views from their districts but no one walks out of meetings, as apparently they do in other metropolitan areas. They meet very regularly. (Officer A) The contrast that is perhaps implicit here is with the Liverpool city-region, where local authority leaders have so far been less convinced of the merits of the arrangements proposed for city-regions, as acknowledged by most of the Liverpool-based interviewees. One of several interviewees who had worked in both cities, for instance, was concerned that: The Liverpool city-region doesn t function...as a coherent group of administrations working together to a genuinely shared agenda...lots of the boroughs seem to think that their interests as individual boroughs are paramount and outweigh the benefits we get from working together and the bigger picture. We don t seem to work together as single-mindedly and effectively 360

7 Mythic Manchester as Greater Manchester outwardly Greater Manchester presents itself better to government. (Official C) By contrast, since the bids for the Olympic and Commonwealth Games in the 1980s (Cochrane et al., 1996), the Manchester model has been seen as disciplined, both by those in Manchester and those beyond. The view of one highly placed insider provided helpful insights into how this worked: The thing about the AGMA model, which moved towards the combined authority model, is that it requires maturity. It requires people to put aside parochial interests in the interests of the broader city-region. That might have frustrated people...because your scheme, your transport scheme might not go ahead for some time...but within the broad economic model it was the right way to go. (Politician B) It is in this context that claims are made by local politicians about the emergence of a distinctive Manchester model for devolution. The Manchester model, it is argued, is distinct from the London model, with its split between an elected mayor and assembly: We have a model for how we want to run public services in Manchester that was designed in Manchester and that works. If we are successful in taking more power from central government, we will undoubtedly need more capacity, both political and executive, to manage that. But the only sensible way of providing that capacity is by building on what we have already achieved, not throwing all of that away for a flawed model from elsewhere. (Leese, 2014) This talk of a model is not, of course, unique to Manchester. Contemporary urban economic and social policies often emerge from particular locations and become constructed as models that others can and should seek to emulate (McCann and Ward, 2010, 2011). In the following sections, we turn to examine the powerful shaping influences that help explain how the Greater Manchester model rose to prominence in the English devolution debate. Scalar selectivity: maintaining the city-region focus against alternative spatial imaginaries The Northern Powerhouse is one of a succession of proposals for improving the economic performance of cities in North West England that have emphasised the need for enhanced inter-city cooperation. Between the 1970s and the 1990s regional planners sought to develop a Mersey Belt concept based on the idea that it would be of mutual benefit to both Liverpool and Manchester (Deas et al., 2015). During the New Labour years, , a succession of initiatives, such as the Liverpool-Manchester Vision, attempted to encourage cooperation between the two principal cities of the North West typically with limited success (Chape and Wray, 2012). Although relations between the two cities were felt by interviewees to have improved, some working in the Liverpool city-region felt that this had been partial and tentative: I think they would always be careful about getting into relationships with partners. The position in Manchester is very much... Manchester and London, and Manchester and key European cities rather than their near neighbours. We are not big enough and important enough to feel too associated with Manchester. (Official B) Manchester s approach to the Northern Way initiative helps illustrate some of the selectivities involved. Introduced by Labour in 2004, the regional authorities in the North West, North East and Yorkshire and Humberside were asked to develop a joint strategy for the north of England. The resultant strategy argued that the northern economy was not unified but 361

8 Haughton, Deas, Hincks and Ward rather driven by eight constituent city-regions. For one interviewee, a former regional official, Manchester was politically astute during these years, presenting itself alongside Leeds as the twin urban economies on which future policy support ought to converge in order to drive economic development across the wider growth corridor. Aligning with Leeds in this way allowed the city-region to present to central government a strategy for agglomerative urban economic growth that was in tune with how Treasury thinking was developing (HM Treasury et al., 2007). Whereas Manchester sought to cultivate good relations with Leeds, the same interviewee contended that in relation to the North West, Manchester s leaders were happy to see the power base of regional institutions being undermined (Official C). A rather different take on this process came from one political leader in Manchester: What the Northern Way work indicated was that first of all that economic growth was nodal...john Prescott s idea was this J shaped route from Newcastle down to Liverpool. The analysis showed quite clearly no, that was not how it worked. There were a number of nodes and in terms of quantity around growth that there is a hierarchy and the top of that hierarchy was Manchester followed by Leeds and the next level of Newcastle, Liverpool and Sheffield and then Preston, Hull, Middlesbrough. (Politician A) The Northern Way strategy, then, was developed in ways that supported the cityregional case. Whilst the Northern Way as a spatial imaginary had emerged as a contiguous pan-regional growth corridor, its colonisation by Manchester allowed the city to further its city-regional ambitions (Deas and Ward, 2002). By contrast, at least some in the private sector in the North West remained committed to the idea of development corridors as the best approach to regenerating the economies of the region, a vision set out in some detail in the work around the Atlantic Gateway concept put forward by one of the region s leading land-owners, Peel Group (Deas et al., 2015; Harrison, 2014). This provided an alternative spatial imaginary based around the Peelowned Manchester Ship Canal and covering Liverpool, Manchester and their surrounding areas. The concept of a development corridor linking the region s principal cities had emerged initially under the tenure of the North West Development Agency. Concerned that the latter s abolition left behind a balkanised landscape of separate and competing local authorities lacking the desire or capacity to work collaboratively or strategically, Peel promoted Atlantic Gateway as a long-term, visionary private sector-led economic development plan, around which an array of regional actors could cohere. For some supporters of the Atlantic Gateway, alternative geographies based on city-regions were unconvincing: they made sense to the public sector but not to business, echoing the recurring disjuncture between institutional geographies and real economic spaces. This became a particular issue of contention from 2010, when the Coalition Government invited proposals for a new network of Local Enterprise Partnerships (LEPs) to replace the soon-to-be-dissolved Regional Development Agencies: We felt at that time that there wasn t enough emphasis or consideration on what was a major economic growth corridor of its own right. So to try and provide a counterweight to the city-regional concept When the LEP [invitation was published] there was an emphasis on relevant economic geographies. So we thought what they are clearly getting at here is something of an Atlantic Gateway scale...clearly it works at that level for us. But the public sector response to economic geographies was much more about travelto-work areas and city core[s]. (Director A, private sector) 362

9 Mythic Manchester From this particular perspective, focusing on cities as the primary generators of economic growth was a fundamental misreading of how real economies work, as another private sector director explained: We did get in the period a thinking which was driven by office development in city centres... an idea that they were the generators in their own right There was a lack of understanding of how real economies work for a model that produced good results in city centres [W]e wanted to...understand some of the wider geographies which drove international trade, manufacturing and logistics. (Private sector B) Set against this argument, however, was the view that growth corridors never worked, because unlike cities, people did not identify with them: In general corridor type approaches don t [work] there is lots and lots of work which shows that, there are always people who want Dublin-Belfast corridor whatever actually corridors aren t places. Whatever you want to do is always essentially nodal not linear. (Politician A). This assertion of nodal city imaginaries as more meaningful than corridor visions effectively dismisses the possibility that they might co-exist. It is telling in this respect that whilst sympathetic to the city-region case, central government politicians have been careful not to specify a single geography for the Northern Powerhouse. Significantly, in the 2015 Cities and Local Government Devolution bill the decision was made to allow Combined Authorities from all parts of the country. Pragmatically then, central government managed to back city-regions, in particular Greater Manchester, whilst leaving room for alternative state space formations to emerge that might in due course challenge the current city-regional model. In similarly pragmatic vein, the Peel Group has lent its support to the government s agenda for the Northern Powerhouse and greater powers being devolved to city-regions (Peel Group, 2015). Finding suitable theories, sifting the evidence-base and building coalitions Greater Manchester leaders have put considerable resources into building their own in-house research-cum-lobbying capability in the form of New Economy, the self-styled think tank for Greater Manchester. Providing analytical support to AGMA, GMCA and the Greater Manchester LEP, New Economy has played a critical role in influencing the intellectual agenda that underpins city-region governance and policy for Greater Manchester. Through its oversight of the Manchester Independent Economic Review (MIER), New Economy was able to construct an evidence base that has been used subsequently to legitimise the emphasis on agglomerative urban growth which infuses city-regional policy (see Overman et al., 2009). As one interview put it, the MIER underpins the importance of agglomeration economics and how Greater Manchester [is] greater than the sum of its parts (Public official A). The findings of the MIER also proved critical in forming the basis for the case used by the city-region to convince successive governments of the need for increased fiscal and policy-making autonomy to allow the city to punch its weight : Manchester is probably the UK city outside London most likely to be able to increase its long-term growth rate, to access international networks and enjoy strong connections to the rest of the world. However, it is currently punching below its weight given its size. We believe this is an opportunity: the city has the potential to grow faster and to continue to reinvent itself and 363

10 Haughton, Deas, Hincks and Ward regain its historical dynamism. (Manchester Independent Economic Review 2009, p.7) The MIER was overseen by a small group of five independent experts, who commissioned a series of thematic reports. In their overview report, the MIER expert panel provided a summary of what they took from the report on agglomeration economies: These rankings point to the potential for Manchester ahead of all other cities outside London (due to Bristol s small size and peripheral location) to take advantages of the benefits of agglomeration and increase its growth (Manchester Independent Economic Review 2009, p.38) This short summary raises a number of issues worth reflecting on, given that variants of these claims recur in official documents used to promote the case for Manchester. The original report is guided by the review panel to focus only on large cities as potential comparators: in the final analysis To keep things manageable, we ignore results for the three smallest city regions (Aberdeen, Leicester and Nottingham) (Overman et al., 2009, p.44). This selection process of omitting smaller cities is deeply problematic, since it excludes from consideration many urban economies that have outperformed Manchester s on most measures over both the long term and more recently (Centre for Cities, 2015). The panel summary quote above then goes a step further in rationalising the decision not to compare Bristol s economic potential with Manchester s on the grounds of the Bristol s supposed peripherality, when Bristol (120 miles away) is closer to London than is Manchester (210 miles). This process of data selectivity in constructing a narrative of Manchester as the UK s foremost potential future growth centre becomes almost a self-fulfilling prophecy, more akin to policybased evidence-making than evidence-based policy-making. The Greater Manchester model has been actively built and shared via numerous urban networks, including supporting a range of external alliances intended to help shape national city-region debates. Manchester was one of the founders of the Core Cities group, a subscription-based group steered by city leaders, created to lobby on behalf of the eight largest cities outside London, later joined by Cardiff and Glasgow. Manchester s leaders have drawn on the support of the Core Cities group in seeking to build and present to government an evidenced case for greater devolution of powers to city-regions: Generally speaking, with whatever government, begging bowl approaches tend not to work. The approach that works is offering solutions and that s what we try and do One of the things Core Cities has done for us [is] not so much lobbying but its case-making. It s been about building evidence. It s been about being able to persuade ministers and senior civil servants that in terms of meeting their objectives what we are proposing is the best way of doing it. (Politician A) The adopted approach appears to have been to nurture as wide a range of relationships, and to work with those think tanks and others best positioned to provide convincing evidencebased arguments or those most likely to have most credibility with the government of the day. Reflecting the growing role of think tanks in the UK, Manchester sought to reaffirm its position as the principal proto-devolution experiment: We will work with think tanks, IPPR [Institute for Public Policy Research] is one, Centre for Cities is another. We are currently developing some work between Core Cities and the RSA [Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce]. We ve even worked with Policy Exchange. Actually right of centre if it s a 364

11 Mythic Manchester right of centre government then you have to get into their way of thinking if you want to have an impact, so we do work with those. (Politician A). It is not entirely clear what the Policy Exchange work referred to involved, but possibly it was the joint Localis and Policy Exchange (2009) report, Can localism deliver? Lessons from Manchester. With an introduction from Lord Heseltine, a key figure in promoting city-region devolution, this piece of work is essentially a paean to Manchester and a plea for others in local government to take heed and learn. In 2014, another think tank report on the Manchester experience was commissioned, this time from ResPublica and funded by Manchester City Council, the GMCA, New Economy and others: Devo Max-Devo Manc (Blond and Morrin, 2014).This report also extolled Greater Manchester s achievements and argued for further powers to be devolved. Released in the wake of the referendum on Scottish independence and the resultant increase in interest in devolution across the UK, and in time for the annual conferences of the major political parties, the report attracted considerable media coverage. Adding to the seeming groundswell of influential reports on city-regions was a 12-month inquiry set up by the RSA, involving the creation of a City Growth Commission, supported by the Core Cities Group, the Mayor of London and others. The Commission was chaired by Jim O Neill, previously a member of the fiveperson MIER steering group, with the chief executives of New Economy and the Centre for Cities as advisors. The final report, Unleashing Metro Growth, restated the case for supporting city-regions (City Growth Commission, 2014). These wide-ranging attempts to construct alliances and influence debates have helped to shape the terms and the terrain of the UK s devolution debate. This has been incremental and painstaking work but has had the effect of locating Greater Manchester centre stage in the still on-going process of state territorialisation. This has involved an acceptance that the city-region s case-making work has to be couched in terms that are acceptable to successive central governments. It is no coincidence that, rather than challenge extensive cuts to public expenditure as part of government s austerity programme, GMCA has instead tried to present a positive case for enhanced policy autonomy and increased fiscal discretion that accords to Whitehall s wider agenda for policy and institutional reform. For those involved, this commitment to extend and deepen public services reform is seen as crucial, a case set out by Sir Richard Leese, leader of Manchester City council and Vice Chair of the GMCA: this isn t just a growth deal it s a growth and reform deal. Our vision for Manchester is that growth and the reform of public services, increasing people s independence while reducing demand and costs, go hand-in-hand. Together we believe these two strands can make Greater Manchester self-sufficient and neutral to the public purse. 3 In the context of the austerity cuts to public services nationally and locally, local authorities have been encouraged to develop and pilot new forms of intervention for vulnerable people. The aim is to reduce the aggregate demand made on the public purse by targeting service users said to account for a disproportionate share of demand, and by coordinating support for them across multiple agencies in a more effective and cost efficient way. This demand management work is already well underway and our interviews suggested considerable political support. There appears here to be a shared conviction at central and local government level that, given the need to spend public money more effectively, local actors were best positioned to develop innovative local solutions. There are, however, risks involved, including concerns about the capacity and 365

12 Haughton, Deas, Hincks and Ward knowledge base of local government to take on these new responsibilities (Inman, 2015). Conclusion: mythic Manchester as an evolving model for urban economic growth What Manchester does today, the rest of the world does tomorrow. (Benjamin Disraeli, 1844, cited in Localis and Policy Exchange, 2009 among many places) Mancunians love to celebrate their local heroes. In Albert Square, outside Manchester Town Hall, statues of Victorian luminaries stand as testament to past achievements, including some of the famous Manchester Men who campaigned for trade liberalisation. Since the 1980s, the tradition of public-spirited local leaders combining to bring back wealth to the city has been self-consciously recreated, as the contemporary Manchester Men have sought to transform external perception of their city as one scarred by industrial decline, and reinvent it as once again one of international standing (Tickell and Peck, 1996). This is perhaps best embodied in the establishment of a Manchester Day in 2010, the purpose of which is to celebrate all things Mancunian. In years to come, it may be that mythic Manchester will be celebrating the current generation of civic leaders too. Alternatively, today s city-region leaders might come to be seen as having been outwitted, willingly accepting central government pressure to absorb expenditure cuts in return for the promise of additional powers and future funds that prove more modest than anticipated and come with strings attached. To put this in perspective, the cityregion agreement will see substantial funds devolved to the city-region authorities by central government for housing, transport and other purposes. However, it is unclear if any of this is new money. Rather it appears that GMCA will simply take responsibility for its allocation. The BBC has estimated that the ten local authorities of Greater Manchester will lose 285m in mainstream budgets in This follows 1.2bn in cuts and the loss of 10,000 local government jobs since 2010 (Fitzpatrick, 2014). Proposals to devolve the responsibility for managing and integrating some 6bn of health and social care spending could radically change the equation. At one level, this would offer the potential to experiment with ways of producing savings by coordinating these two areas of responsibility more effectively. But in the context of rising demand and tight budgets, this could also be seen as another mandate to help central government find ways of reducing the costs of welfare and reapportion responsibility for awkward decisions about how to make cuts. This, then, might be a more recent example of a centrally prescribed localism based on a weak governance model: an illusory form of devolution in which local statutory responsibility increases, but diminishing central government funding leaves local authorities more dependent on their ability to raise local revenues. Though Manchester leaders have been active in helping shape the policy landscape, in effect the devolution settlement has been imposed from above, with the rewards going to those who can dance most credibly to the tune of central government. A full audit of the extent to which funds will be reallocated to city-regions is difficult to compile, with new initiatives coming on-stream incrementally and the effects of cuts not always clearly specified. But it is possible that in aggregate terms future evaluations will judge it to have it been good politics to have managed to gain some extra spending capacity at Greater Manchester level to help offset cuts at district level, in terms of the quantum of public money coming to the city-region. Alternatively, local leaders may be seen to have assumed the unenviable responsibility of delivering central government s austerity agenda, gaining increased discretion only over how dwindling 366

13 Mythic Manchester funds are allocated. This echoes the situation many US cities have faced as austerity measures have been downloaded from federal to municipal level. Our theoretical framework took as its starting point the need to question the dominance of pre-determined economic models about how cities might work, requiring instead detailed investigation of how substantive economies emerge as complex and moving hybrids of multiple modes of economic coordination between states and markets, involving competition, regulation, redistribution and reciprocity. All four of these were evident in our case study: competition as a competitive city-region model achieved ascendancy over redistributive models, re-regulation as selective powers are devolved to city-regional authorities, devolutionary austerity and the development of a governance model based on local cooperation and trust. The result is a fundamental re-reading of the success of the Manchester model, not least through the attention paid to an understanding of how a particular type of economic model of the (national and city-regional) economy has been actualized and operationalized through the construction of a powerful narrative that has informed the case for devolution presented to and by central government. Our work suggests that this narrative was supported by a selectively constructed evidence base built up from commissioned research, engagement with an array of think tanks and the support of academic champions: an informational infrastructure in the words of McCann (2008, p.12). Evidence-based policy is central to the political appeal of the Manchester model, but our work begins to expose how this involved the adoption of a particular economic model, agglomeration economics, with theory playing a less celebrated but nonetheless crucial mediating role that resulted in some questionable decisions about the way in which evidence was assembled and used to inform policy decisions. The example of Greater Manchester reveals the combination of two processes of public policy and governance reform articulated through the devolution debate: one aimed at concentrating support for growth in urban areas of economic potential, in an apparently paradoxical attempt to promote interregional balance; the other devolving responsibility for managing the unequal social and spatial consequences of growth to city-region authorities compelled to raise more resources locally. What is surprising here is that city leaders, including those in areas where meaningful agglomerative growth remains a remote prospect, jostle for the apparently questionable benefits associated with devolution. While there is a powerful argument for enhanced local policy autonomy, a balanced space economy may be less likely in a context in which central government no longer maintains a level fiscal playing field. Devolution brings with it risks as well as rewards for local areas, as losers and winners begin to emerge. Quite how many of each materialise in future will go some way to shaping the continued local political buy-in to the devolution agenda. End Notes 1 [Accessed 16 March 2016]. 2 [Accessed 16 March 2016]. 3 growth_plan_factsheet.pdf?static=1, accessed 4 February Acknowledgements We gratefully acknowledge support funding from the Hamburg Science Foundation and Humanities Strategic Investment Fund, University of Manchester. Helpful comments were provided on earlier drafts by Jamie Peck, Hugo Radice, John Shutt, Dave Carter and the reviewers of this journal. The usual disclaimers apply. 367

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