Where next for our cities?

May 2009 Newsletter

This newsletter is partly a response to the increasing requests for information that we get at Core Cities, but it could not come at a more interesting time; the profile of cities in national policy and the media is at its highest for years.

Just as we were starting to feel cast adrift by recession, the release of the Sub National Review and Pre Budget Report swung the policy compass-needle around once more in the direction of devolution.

The Budget then confirmed some real wins for Core Cities, with a big step toward greater powers and resources for city regions, and a commitment to properly explore our proposals for innovative financing; ‘Accelerated Development Zones’. The announcement is a great achievement and success for all the Core Cities, demonstrating the power of collaborative working.

Much of the original thinking on city regions was done by the Core Cities Group and although formal status has so far only been accorded to two cities – Manchester and Leeds – and we would have liked to see a bolder move, it is a firm step on the road to decentralisation.

Our ADZ ideas have not yet been approved, but I really welcome their inclusion in the budget. At a moment of reducing public finance, we have to think hard about how to provide economically vital local authorities like the Core Cities with the tools they need to generate recovery and increased tax revenues. At a time like this we need our Core Cities to be firing on all cylinders. This announcement will take us closer to that point.

But we still need to maintain a focus on the cities at the centre that drive economic growth, with their assets, infrastructure, high-value industry and employment. We now need to work together to achieve strong cities and strong city regions.

Taken together, the announcement on city regions and innovative financing will help cities to deliver some serious recession busting initiatives. We now need to move quickly to implementation.”

Recent reports from Michael Parkinson (The Credit Crunch and Regeneration: Impact and Implications) and Centre for Cities (Cities Outlook 2009), contain warnings about navigating the future, but also set out the importance of cities to economic recovery. Both have boosted mainstream media interest. The message is clear: cities created economic growth in the first place and they will drive recovery, but they need greater devolution in order to do so.

The eight Core Cities have achieved fantastic gains through regeneration. With their city regions, these places now produce more wealth than London and contain a third of England's population; they make our economy viable.

However, as I said in a recent article for Independent Online (A Taxing Time for our Cities), ‘if we fail to prepare, we prepare to fail’ for economic recovery, and cities need more help to put in place the building blocks for medium and long term prosperity, because these are the places that will make it happen.

The city agenda has a high profile. Our language and many of our ideas have been adopted in national policy, and some of the gains we have sought for years appear to be within reach. So where next?

The answer has to be to move from debate to action, to set a course from policy to implementation.

That is why the Leaders of the Core Cities wrote to the Prime Minister at the end of last year, setting out specific ideas for economic recovery; why we are meeting with all three parties to talk about the vital role of our cities; why we held an ‘implementation group’ meeting with regional and national partners to work on making the Sub National Review and Empowerment White Paper a reality; and that’s why we are launching a ‘Pledge for Cities’, with the ideas we want all parties to adopt.

Uppermost in our concerns is to maintain a focus on skills and employment, and increase our ability to fund the infrastructure that we know will underpin recovery, driving forward innovative financing concepts like Accelerated Development Zones (link). These and other elements of strong city-making form the basis for the agenda of our working groups, some of whom report below. It is difficult to get a sense of the scale of the excellent work these groups undertake, and only a few examples are included in this newsletter.

Asking ‘where next?’ raises some immediate and specific challenges, but on that journey we must not take our eyes off the long term prizes of economic growth and increased social cohesion.

The final port of call for much of this work in 2009 is Liverpool, host city to the Core Cities Summit, from 2nd to 4th November. This promises to be the ‘urban gathering’ of the year, with senior policy makers, deliverers, politicians and business people focusing on action for cities. With our research partner Centre for Cities, we will use this cross-party event to showcase new evidence, research and ideas not just for economic recovery, but for growth and competitiveness into the future.