Manchester’s £100m fund will be spent quickly, says Boylan
GREATER Manchester’s city leaders are looking to invest “the bulk” of the new £100m investment fund within 18 months.
Speaking ahead of the launch of the £100m fund to businesses last night, Stockport Metropolitan Borough Council’s chief executive Eamonn Boylan told TheBusinessDesk.com that the criteria on which projects will be assessed will include its scale and potential economic impact, deliverability, and the speed at which investment will be repaid in order to allow funds to be recycled.
The fund has been pooled from a variety of pots including £20m from the ERDF-backed JESSICA fund, £30m from the most recent round of the Government’s Regional Growth Fund (RGF) and £25m from the new Growing places fund. All three of these are available to invest immediately.
“So provided we can identify projects and get through due diligence as quickly as we can, we’re certainly aiming to invest as much of this as we can in the next financial year,” he added.
Barbara Spicer, chief executive of Salford City Council, added: “The faster it’s invested, the faster it comes back and the faster it creates jobs. These developments are not being done for the sake of themselves. It’s to provide economic growth.”
Ms Spicer added that the creation of the fund represented “the next step of maturity” in terms of the relationship between the leaders of Greater Manchester’s ten councils, who hail from all three of the major political parties.
Mr Boylan said that several of the pots had different criteria for investment, and that for many private sector organisations, but he said that by combining the different pots into one overarching fund it should mean that businesses attempting to access money “don’t have to continually reinvent projects to match funding criteria”.
Peel’s attempt to build a multi-modal transport hub on the banks of the Manchester Ship Canal is one such project which had already been earmarked for investment through the Regional Growth Fund, while cash for infrastructure for the £659m Airport City Enterprise Zone are likely to be among the initial investments made.
Ms Spicer said that Airport City “is inherently important to… and has the absolute support of all 10 districts”.
The redevelopment of the sprawling Shell oil refinery project at Carrington is likely to be among the longer term schemes supported.
“What we’re looking for are those projects that are inherently commercial but in the current climate are perhaps marginally unfundable,” said Mr Boylan.
He added that city bosses believed that the investment fund could be used to lever in much greater private funds from institutions including banks and pension funds – initially through funding individual projects but potentially at the level of the fund itself once a trackrecord is established.
