Regeneration: Post-RDA world is not so scary, says Emmerich

MANCHESTER’S city-region will not be as impacted by the public sector cuts as other regional cities because of the “huge pipeline” of investment already secured by its leaders, according to the chief executive of its New Economy commission.

Speaking at a Downtown Manchester In Business event on Monday titled The New Agenda for Manchester, Emmerich said that projects approved by the last Labour government which survived the cuts should mean that Manchester is in a better position than many of its regional peers.

“If you’re anywhere near Rochdale, Oldham, Tameside south Manchester then there’s a load of new transport kit that’s going to arrive around your way. That’s going to continue to change the infrastructure of the city and to drive the labour market.

“In it’s way, it is every bit as big as what’s happened in the last five years.”

Emmerich praised city leaders Sir Richard Leese and Sir Howard Bernstein for “thinking ahead” in bidding for the £50m pot of funding for Jessica funding and then leveraging in institutional cash to build the fund. He said that there is currently around £300m in the JESSICA pot to invest in stalled investments.

“That is going to grow considerably – possibly to multiples of that,” he added.

“We’ll use to continue to drive investment in commercial property, transport, housing and in skills.

“If we get those things right it should provide be a wave of investment which should tide us over until the private sector starts to invest again.”

MIDAS chief executive Angie Robinson said that many organisations which are there to support businesses. Unitl recently, MIDAS was contracted by the North West Regional Development Agency (NWDA) as the sub-regional body responsible for bringing in inward investment. Under the new Local Economic Partnership, it is has been charged with leading the creation of a new centre of excellence for Internationalisation.

It is also bidding for funding from UK Trade and Investment to carry on its programme of supporting international trade in Greater Manchester.

“People keep saying to me ‘don’t you think it’s a mistake moving to a publicly-funded body from the private sector?’.

“But for me it’s another day in the office because in the private sector we hit this wall some time ago. Doing things differently with less in a smarter way is my stock in trade and has been for many years.”

She said that efforts were being made to better align overseas trade efforts with inward investment programmes.

“While there’s going to be less money around – and in some cases no money – we’re clear about what our priorities are.

“The opportunity to leverage greater output from firms in Greater Manchester by aligning these activities together has got to be a smart move.”

 Emmerich said that the first task of the “shadow” LEP (which has its first meeting on Friday) would be to recruit a new board for the Local Enterprise Partnership which comes into force next April, but added that it also has an important role in quickly running the rule over the NWDA’s local activities to see what can be salvaged.

He added that AGMA had already begun a process of working with the NWDA six months ago “so that it’s not about the NWDA managing down what it does and the last one out switchings the lights off”.

“We started to ask what it was that the NWDA was funding, when the funding runs out, what it is that is working and how we carry that on, as well as what isn’t working and perhaps needs re-engineering.

“We’re going to have a u-bend in funding, but what we can’t afford to do is have a u-bend in activity if we’re going to pull ahead of places who, frankly, aren’t as fleet of foot as we are.”