The who’s who of Manchester property descended on the historic Baronial Hall at Chetham’s School of Music for EG’s Manchester Question Time to quiz leading figures on how the city should evolve to maintain its world-class status.
The crowd didn’t leave disappointed, ?as the panel spoke frankly on issues ranging from inward investment and ?HS2 to cultivating a skilled workforce.
The panel, chaired by EG editor Damian Wild, included Manchester city council chief executive Sir Howard Bernstein; Anne Fairhurst, partner in real estate at Mills & Reeve; Mat Oakley, head of European commercial property research at Savills; Bruntwood director of property marketing Colin Sinclair; and Midas chief executive Tim Newns.
Sir Howard Bernstein, chief executive at Manchester city council, on…
Inward investment
We place the airport, the university and?other key assets?at the heart of our strategy around technology, digital activities and life science, and it has created strong evidence of increasing demand. In turn, this fuels property and a wider critical mass of commercial and professional services, ?and that is what Manchester has got right.
HS2
Firstly, if we don’t spend all that money ?on high-speed rail, most of it is going?to go down to London. We are spending something like 20 times the amount ?per head of population on transport in ?London than anywhere else in the country.
Secondly, this is not a debate about ?travel time, this is a debate about how ?we can create more capacity for demand over the next 10 to 15 years: demand?for international travel and demand for additional capacity for commuter traffic serving Greater Manchester. It is about how we are going to create the capacity?to transfer road freight onto rail to ?relieve increasingly congested roads.
The only problem is London won’t spend another £1bn to ensure the linkage between HS1 and HS2 is made effectively, and we should address that.
Airport City
This gives us an opportunity to create ?a world-class competitive property ?offer and that is something we will see increasing definition of over the next week, when certain announcements are made.
Rate relief
Governments don’t get place. If they?did, they would understand why we ?have a town centre crisis. Now, we ?have to rethink the role town centres?play in our economy.
There are lots of opportunities for ?towns to reinvent themselves with the demand for value-driven space, work ?space and small start-ups. The problem?is, repopulating those town centres is ?left to local initiative, rather than being undertaken within a national framework.
That applies particularly to the relocalisation debate around business ?rates. If Manchester was incentivised?by being able to retain all its business ?rates, we would be able to declare a business rate-free zone and capture all ?the benefits associated with increasing?tax take, but we can’t. We would have?to find the resources from somewhere ?else to plug the gap.
Colin Sinclair, director of property marketing at Bruntwood, on…
Harnessing Manchester’s academic and research expertise
If you are going to get growth of indigenous firms, benefit from R&D and university spin-outs, The Corridor [a 600-acre academic campus in Manchester] is the prime location. And there is a really strong argument for clustering, but clustering only works if it is next to universities with R&D skills.
Even the AstraZeneca and Alderley Park sites – which are not on The Corridor – need to link into universities like Manchester. If they have that high-level link they will work, but the most natural place for them is The Corridor. The ownership of that area between the university and the Central Manchester NHS Trust is critical.
Town centres
There are town centres and there are destinations. The latter you go to for leisure, tourism, history, or maybe there is a university. The former are the problem, and there has to be a partnership between the local authority and the private sector to make a difference. Even the centres that can be transformed have probably got twice as many retail units as they really need, so people have got to be bold.
Mat Oakley, ?head of European commercial property research at Savills, on…
What Manchester does right
Inward investors could get a pitch anywhere in the world about great office space and great workers, but not retail, residential and schools. But Manchester comes to the table with the full package – it understands ?what motivates these decisions. Something that’s also very high in Manchester’s favour is its retention of graduates.
High streets
If everybody in this room went out ?tonight and spent £5 more than they ?were planning on spending, the high streets would reactivate. We are confusing structural change with cyclical change. ?We have just been through the worst recession since the Second World War. People are spending less and practicing precautionary saving. It will get better. Many of these streets will fill up naturally.
Inward investment
We obsess about inward investors creating big jobs, but maybe that means we forget the local businesses and making sure they have an atmosphere to grow in – nurturing them and stopping them leaving.
Housing
I have lost track the number of US multi-family housing operators flying over here and saying ‘we know what we are doing’.?I have a slight feeling that maybe these guys are failing when it comes to bidding for sites up against a traditional build-to-sell model. We need some strong brands ?to emerge – people who understand the product, the marketing and the management. In the US, people will move from one Bozzuto apartment to another because it has a strong brand and a good service. It will happen here, and someone will make a huge amount of money. I’ll stake a bet that Manchester will probably be the second best at it.
The North West’s biggest opportunity
The North West has been creative for as long as you can remember, and if you can continue to harness that, people will leave university and want to start their career in Manchester.
Its biggest challenge
There is still an awful lot of comparing ourselves to London, but it is about the ?rest of the world. Manchester should be looking to China and not worry about London or Liverpool or York – be a leader, not a follower.
Anne Fairhurst, partner, real estate, at Mills ?& Reeve, on…
Manchester’s pull
You have only ?got to look at ?the excitement we’ve had ?with graphene, and those incredible gentlemen [graphene’s inventors] ?were given the freedom of Manchester. People find things like that enormously attractive.
And graphene is not just an academic finding – it will support SMEs and it is the SMEs we need to encourage – they are the people that are going to really ?drive growth.
High streets
Mary Portas was harking back to an earlier time. We can’t have a butcher, a baker and a candlestick maker on every high street. We have got to take an area-by-area approach and this is where the Localism Act is going to be important.
There is a lovely story about Frankie and the Heartstrings. The band were releasing their second album and they realised there wasn’t a record shop in their area, so they opened one and now they host gigs, sell records, trade old vinyl and make coffees for people. We need a relaxation of the planning so we can always have lots of Frankie and the Heartstrings.
The North West’s biggest challenge
We have two big changes: the economy is transitioning into a period of low growth and getting into areas where we need to have a low carbon environment. So we need to learn how to operate in that environment.
Tim Newns, ?chief executive?at Midas, on…
What Manchester does best
The city has understood where its assets are and ?it continues to understand how those assets can develop. As an agency, ?we always try to be incredibly commercial in the way we look at things, so understanding the key business drivers ?has really taken us all the way.
Inward investment
We do a huge amount of research behind the different industries we operate in to determine what these key drivers are. We need to go into meetings with businesses almost anticipating what their needs are ?at any one time so we get early buy-in. Some of our biggest projects over the last few years have been with firms like Jacobs Engineering, which already had 500 people here, but through supporting them in winning business in Saudi Arabia, that brought in another 400 jobs here. That, to me, is inward investment, even though other people would see it as expansion.
Airport City
Manchester’s connectivity is primarily European. We have got great East Coast US routes and growing Middle Eastern routes, but we are still very much growing our Asia Pacific and South America routes. But it is because of our European routes that we know Airport City is going to ?be a huge attraction as a European headquarters for companies with multiple locations. We have had four European headquarters set up at the airport already over the past 12 months.
When HS2 kicks in, we will be able to fly straight in. We are 80 minutes from London from the airport, so we can cover the major UK market, both in the North and in the South East as well. But we ?also have onward connectivity into Europe – 200 destinations at our fingertips. ?That is absolutely unrivalled.
Residential development
The university has secured a huge, multinational contract. A very senior member of that organisation wants to relocate to Manchester as part of it, and ?he can’t find a house in the £700,000 to £800,000 mark that meets his needs.
So it is certainly in our consciousness that if we can facilitate a residential development, we will. But we have ?to understand the different levels of consumer demand so we can make sure the right product is being developed.
Challenges and opportunities
There are two for me: skills and transport, because transport can draw those skills into the jobs market. But the skills are both a challenge and an opportunity. We need ?to be able to predict what the skills needs will be in five or 10 years’ time and build that through our secondary education system, through to our universities and apprenticeship systems and into all the different layers of skills development.
The engineering industry, for example, has an enormous demand for engineers, and while the North West is well-sited in terms of existing skills, engineering is an ageing one that needs backfilling.
As for transport, we particularly need to get intra-regional transport right – which is already well under way with the Northern Hub – in order to get these skilled people to our employment sites.
Let’s face it, what actually differentiates Manchester on a European level is the fact that we have access to a workforce of over seven million people within a 50-mile commuter belt.
Derek Hatton, former deputy leader at Liverpool city council, on…
What Manchester does differently
In the 1980s, when the question of the dissolution of Merseyside county council came, we had the opportunity to go towards a Greater Liverpool, like a Greater Manchester, and we didn’t do ?it because we didn’t think of the importance of it, so credit to Manchester for thinking that.
Also, what Manchester has done is ?taken real decisions to get to the next stage. I don’t think Liverpool has done that.
HS2
I look at some of the opposition to HS2 and one of the arguments is natterjack toads. Since the 1980s there must have been hundreds of millions of developments and all the consequential jobs and life improvements stopped because of a natterjack toad – I don’t know of anyone who has ever seen one! I will always support some sides of ecology, but there?is a danger we get caught along with ?the opposition.
High streets
I am a great believer in car-free city ?centres. The more pedestrian areas ?there are, the more people are going ?to feel happy to be there. And once ?people are happy to be there, they are?going to be more likely to start spending. ?Local authorities will have to take the?lead on that.
Challenges facing Manchester
The biggest challenge facing us up in ?the North West and the North is to make sure we are in a position strong enough ?to get the resources we need. We must argue the corner jointly.
? To watch video coverage of this debate and for details about future events, go to www.estatesgazette.com/questiontime
