How can the decision-making process around infrastructure investment be improved?
Mike Whitby, leader, Birmingham City Council (pictured)
How did we get our £600m [to regenerate New Street Station]? Let me tell you, it was torturous. One of the reasons why Britain has been held back, and especially outside of the capital, is the long-winded way it takes to draw down funding from the Treasury towards infrastructural projects.
It is laborious. We had to go through four strategic departments and eventually ended up having to convince the Treasury.
The process took far too long. China and India and the competing cities of the world would sort that out within a year and start building; we need to wake up in the United Kingdom, we really do.
But it’s not just that. The connectivity and the funding for infrastructure development comes when you have the right environment for good public-private sector partnerships. And the city of Birmingham has developed these.
I promote Birmingham throughout the world, and now sovereign wealth funds want to invest money into the city.
Do local voices get listened to sufficiently?
Neil McLean, chair, Leeds City Region Local Enterprise Partnership
In addition to lack of investment, where there has been investment it has not been strategic and it has not been strategically focused on the outcomes that the city region needs. Instead, it has been focused on what central government has decided that the city region needs, and while, in some instances, that’s right, in many instances it’s not right.
Local authorities have to be more creative, they have to be brave, they have to make decisions, and they have to be willing to positively invest.
They have got to ask the business community to fund the Community Infrastructure Levy (CIL) and Tax Increment Financing (TIF). All these can be brought together and it is really now a question of taking the freedoms that I think are available, aggregating the funds and leveraging off them.
Then you’ve really got the ability to make some genuine step changes to our infrastructure.
We are a city region of three million people, over 100,000 businesses and a £52bn economy. To make that economy work we have to have movement.
How important is transport?
Sir Edward Lister, deputy mayor of London
In our London Plan we predict that the population of London will grow to 8.6 million by 2031. That would surpass London’s population back in 1939. Such an increase [would require development] roughly the same as the rebuilding of north west London all over again. It’s that kind of massive building programme we need. It’s also about creating another 600,000 jobs in London.
We are investing £15bn in transport infrastructure between now and 2020. This will increase our transport capacity by about 30%. Crossrail, which is going to transform east to west communications, will alone increase capacity by 10%.
And we are transforming north-south communications through Thameslink, which is nearing completion at the moment.
But we are more ambitious than that, because we believe we need complete control of the overland rail network in the capital.
Currently, we are bidding with the Department for Transport to take over some of the North London lines as well as some of the South East lines when their franchises become due.
It is all about providing a reliable rail system, so that, for us, is a major priority and it’s our big ask of government.
London also desperately needs a new hub airport.
How can local authorities secure investment?
Sir Howard Bernstein, chief executive, Manchester City Council
What we have to do is develop our own investment models where the public resources we can gather together can be deployed to support equity and debt investment alongside the private sector.
Our Evergreen funding model, which was launched last week, has given me increasing confidence that not only is that the way cities can stay ahead of the game but, more particularly, provides scalable propositions for the investment community to join us. I am very confident that over the next few years Greater Manchester will get to a point where we will be talking about a fund of well in excess of £500m.
In our investment model, 10 individual local authorities club together and agree to align funding streams over a 10-year period. That will grow our business base and result in increased business rates going forward.
We want the capacity to capture that growth, which we can then continue to reinvest in our infrastructure.
What role does central government have to play?
Stephen Hollowood, head of public sector, GVA
There needs to be a very strong national framework for the delivery of infrastructure, and that has to come from government, because infrastructure drives our economies at a regional and national level and will affect those knowledge-intensive industries that we need in all of our cities.
It seems to me that central government has an absolutely critical role here to make the connections between the things that all these guys are doing.
We need a continuing pipeline of projects coming forward. Government acts as the glue between all of the work that the city leaders do.
Yet it’s not about a one-size-fits-all approach. All of the cities are very different. They all have different characteristics, and they all have different approaches, so we have to have bespoke policies to take infrastructure forward, and it is government’s job to make sure that collaboration happens.
I would love to see more collaboration between cities to deliver infrastructure; HS2 is a very good example: London to Birmingham, then on to Manchester, then further north.
I think the cities have got to work together much more closely maybe than they have done in the past in order to maximise the benefits for UK plc.
The round table was chaired by Damian Wild, editor, Estates Gazette
