‘Take success for granted at your peril’ – Bernstein

MANCHESTER City Council chief executive Sir Howard Bernstein has warned business and political leaders they “must not rest on their laurels” after setting a rapid pace of a modern regeneration agenda.

Manchester’s unprecedented national profile at the heart of the emerging Northern Powerhouse has led to huge optimism across the city region, but Sir Howard is warning that status cannot be taken for granted.

In an exclusive interview with TheBusinessDesk he said: “As far as regeneration is concerned, you’ve got to keep reinventing yourself.

“Cities which stand still are cities which start walking backwards. We have constantly got to re-evaluate where we’re going. It’s an evolving process.

“The demands of the modern business and the occupier are not the same as they were 10 years ago. We’ve got to anticipate those demands.

“I think we’ve done that very correctly so far. We were the first local authority working with business which got into the investment programme and people looked at us several years ago and said ‘what are they doing?’

“We see a lot of businesses here today which owe their comparative success to some of those investment decisions we took a long time ago.

“We are seeing the conventional investment base in Manchester develop and evolve and that’s great news. What we have to do consistently is make the decisions based on evidence and constantly address what the future demands of business are. And if we continue to do that, we’ll be fine.”

Sir Howard said that the city’s influential leaders had learnt from other recessions which have blighted the local economy over previous decades on how to emerge and grow again.

“We know that when the money dries up there’s nothing happening,” he said. “What we showed, because of the wisdom of the investment decisions we took a decade ago, that we got creative industries, technology, science, research-based businesses and they are now increasingly at the heart of our economic growth strategy.

“What we’ve got to do is not rest on our laurels and work through how to get to the next level, how we increase clustering and extend the breadth of that business base. It is a continuous story.”