Rebecca Riley explores why “Manchesterism” is not a product of copying London, but the result of decades of bottom-up collaboration, shared institutions, and place-based leadership that offer lessons for cities across England.
As a Manc (Boltonian and that creates its own issues on whether we think we are from Manchester or not!) who has worked in Glasgow, London and now Birmingham, lived in Liverpool and had clients/partners nationally, this “Manchesterism” question has been posed to me many times. My answer is generally that it’s been in the making for at least half a century, so whatever we think it is, it isn’t overnight! I thought it might be useful to compare cities to understand “Manchesterism”, particularly London and Manchester.
The debate about English devolution usually centres on powers: who gets to decide what, and how much money flows from the Treasury. But beneath the constitutional arguments sits a more concrete question that rarely gets asked directly: what does London actually own and control that Greater Manchester doesn’t? And does Greater Manchester have anything London can’t match?
The answers reveal a story not just about two city-regions, but about the structural choices that have shaped, and distorted, England’s political economy for decades. More than that, they explain why what Greater Manchester has built from below is now becoming the model for Birmingham, Leeds, Liverpool, Sheffield and a new generation of English city-regions.
London’s arsenal
Start with transport. Transport for London operates on an annual budget of roughly £11 billion. It runs the Tube, the Overground, the Elizabeth line, the Docklands Light Railway (DLR), the tram network, and London’s entire bus system. Greater Manchester’s equivalent, Transport for Greater Manchester, works with around £1.5 billion (capital and revenue), with revenue of £481.7m. That gap alone tells you something fundamental about the two cities’ capacity to shape their own futures. But the real killer isn’t the budget, it’s the revenue powers behind it. London has road-user charging. The Congestion Charge and Ultra Low Emission Zone (ULEZ) together generate over £500m a year in hypothecated revenue that stays in the city and funds its transport system. Greater Manchester has no equivalent power. When it tried to introduce a Clean Air Zone, the political backlash was fierce (a feature of Manchesterism, if we don’t like things!) and the scheme had to be delayed. The Mayor has no mechanism to charge for road use even if he wanted to.
Then there’s land. The Greater London Authority (GLA) owns 635 hectares of developable land across London through GLA Land & Property Ltd, a legacy of the abolished London Development Agency. That land bank gives the Mayor of London direct leverage over housing delivery, commercial development, and place-shaping in a way the Mayor of Greater Manchester simply cannot replicate. Greater Manchester Combined Authority (GMCA) has no consolidated land portfolio. It assembles sites deal by deal, often relying on brownfield remediation funding from central government. This is the same for most other places too.
London also has three active Mayoral Development Corporations, at the Olympic Park, Old Oak Common, and most recently Oxford Street (established Jan 2026) with full planning and compulsory purchase powers. When GM wants to drive regeneration at scale, it negotiates. London can, in specific zones, simply direct.
The borrowing picture compounds the advantage. The GLA holds an AA credit rating from S&P, giving it access to capital markets on terms no other English combined authority can match. It can borrow to invest in a way that is structurally unavailable to GMCA.
And then there is the quieter, less visible advantage: national infrastructure spending. The Department for Transport’s total asset base is valued at £696 billion, the vast majority of it concentrated in London and the South East. In 2024/25, the GLA alone accounted for £3.15 billion in national capital spending. Greater Manchester competes for a fraction of that. The playing field isn’t just uneven, it’s tilted by design.
London’s formidable institutional arsenal has not translated into sustained productivity growth since the 2008 financial crisis, and this is central to the Manchesterism argument. Centre for Cities’ landmark 2023 report, Capital Losses, found that London’s productivity growth collapsed from 3.1% per year pre-crisis to just 0.2% after 2007, making the capital responsible for 42% of the entire national productivity gap that emerged post-GFC. Oxford Economics’ November 2025 analysis reinforced this, describing London’s productivity as “stagnant” since 2008 and highlighting that GVA per job had grown at just 0.2% annually, one-third the national average. The GLA’s own data confirms that London’s real productivity (output per hour) grew by just 1.5% in total between 2008 and 2021, compared to 6.9% nationally. The causes go well beyond financial regulation; the Centre for Cities report identified rising office costs crowding out business investment, housing unaffordability reducing talent pipelines, and weakening agglomeration effects structural problems that London’s fiscal powers have not resolved.
Greater Manchester’s edge
So, is this simply a story of London dominance? Not quite.
ONS data shows Greater Manchester (GM) recorded 1.3% real GDP growth in 2023, outperforming London (0.2%), the South East (0.0%), and the national average (0.3%). Oxford Economics found GM to be the “star performer” among all mayoral combined authorities, with Manchester city centre achieving 3.6% average annual GVA growth since 2008, far higher than any comparable city centre and more than double the national rate of 1.4%. Employment in knowledge-intensive business services has expanded faster in GM than in London or any other combined authority.
Greater Manchester holds three cards that London cannot easily replicate, and they go to the heart of what “Manchesterism” actually means in practice.
The first is the pension fund. The Greater Manchester Pension Fund is the largest local government pension fund in the UK: £32.3 billion in assets, over 436,000 accounts, paying out £880 million a year in benefits. More importantly, it has committed 5% of its portfolio, roughly £1.5 billion, to local investment, with over £1 billion already deployed in the regional economy. An independent assessment found this has delivered 3,752 homes, over 15,300 jobs, and nearly half a million square metres of commercial space. The Good Economy called it “a blueprint for Britain. London, by contrast, has 32 separate borough pension funds; London’s 32 separate borough pension funds are primarily pooled through London CIV, one of six national Local Government Pension Schemes (LGPS) pooling companies, at a combined £34.2 billion, larger in aggregate, but fragmented, less efficient, and with nothing resembling GM’s deliberate local investment programme.
The second is the airport. Greater Manchester’s ten councils collectively own 64.5% of Manchester Airports Group, which operates Manchester, London Stansted, and East Midlands airports. At the pre-COVID peak, dividends to the councils reached £107 million a year. Every single one of London’s airports- Heathrow, Gatwick, Stansted, Luton, City- is privately owned. The councils of Greater Manchester own a globally significant infrastructure asset that generates revenue, supports 45,000 jobs, and connects the region to 280 destinations worldwide. No London borough can say the same.
The third advantage is cultural, and therefore harder to measure, but arguably the most important of all: forty years of voluntary collaboration. When the Greater Manchester County Council was abolished in 1986, the ten boroughs chose to keep working together through the Association of Greater Manchester Authorities ( AGMA), a voluntary association with no legal personality, no compulsory powers, and no guarantee of survival. That body lasted 25 years, built cross-party trust across councils led by Labour, Conservative, and Liberal Democrat leaders, and laid the institutional foundations for everything that followed: the Combined Authority, the devolution deals, the elected mayor, the Bee Network. London’s 32 boroughs have never achieved, or, arguably, attempted, anything comparable. The capital’s governance is top-down by design. Greater Manchester’s was built from the bottom up, by choice, over decades.
A fair challenge is whether Manchester’s rapid growth in knowledge-intensive business services (KIBS), now 244,000 jobs, reflects deliberate GMCA policy or broader structural forces. The answer is both. Cost arbitrage, a deep university talent pipeline, and Manchester Airport’s international connectivity are structural advantages that would have attracted some KIBS activity regardless of governance. But Oxford Economics’ June 2026 analysis is explicit: the “essence of Manchesterism” is the pairing of these structural advantages with consistent policy choices, urban-core densification, transport investment, and the institutional stability that 40 years of cooperative governance provided. KIBS growth was not a stated sectoral priority for GMCA in the way that bus franchising was. It was an emergent outcome of getting the foundational conditions right: the transport network made the city centre accessible, the planning framework concentrated development where agglomeration effects are strongest, and the cooperative governance model gave investors the confidence to commit. This is arguably the most powerful argument for the Manchesterism model: it shows that good institutions and consistent place-making create growth opportunities that no one had to plan for.
Birmingham illustrates the same emergent pattern. The city is now the UK’s second-largest cluster for business, professional and financial services, with 66,000 KIBS jobs generating over 16% of the city’s GVA. Like Manchester, this was not the product of a targeted industrial strategy. It grew from a combination of structural cost advantages, six universities, the Enterprise Zone’s place-making infrastructure, and increasingly, the fiscal tools secured through the West Midlands’ Deeper Devolution Deal. Office take-up in 2024 was the strongest in seven years, with professional services accounting for 59% of all lettings in 2025. Goldman Sachs, HSBC UK, BBC, and all four major consultancies now have significant Birmingham operations. The Birmingham East Mayoral Development Corporation, launched in May 2026 as “Britain’s biggest and most powerful,” directly replicates the development corporation model the blog identifies as part of London’s arsenal. If Manchesterism is about creating the conditions from which knowledge-intensive growth emerges, rather than directing it from above, then Birmingham is the strongest evidence that the model travels.
The machine beneath the politics: How the cooperation model actually works
That culture of collaboration didn’t sustain itself through goodwill alone. It was embedded in a distinctive institutional model, one that has no parallel anywhere else in English local government.
AGMA formally employed zero staff. Instead, individual councils employed officers and held contracts on behalf of all ten. Wigan Council hosted the Policy and Research Unit. Tameside administered the pension fund (and still does). Manchester served as the principal host for strategic functions, with its Chief Executive, Sir Howard Bernstein, acting as the de facto head of paid service for the entire city-region. These weren’t outsourced arrangements; they were secondments, joint appointments, and shared units staffed by council employees whose day job was working for Greater Manchester. As Bernstein put it in his 2022 Harvard interview: “My whole approach has been about place leadership. Not organisational leadership, that’s different.”
The result was an incremental devolution and web of shared teams, with shared objectives, operating through the Commission for the New Economy (GM’s internal think-tank) and now the GMCA Research Team, joint planning units producing shared evidence on housing and transport, even a Brussels office representing GM at the EU, all held together not by statute but by relationships built over decades of monthly meetings between the ten council leaders (Kenealy et al, 2017). Lord Peter Smith chaired AGMA from Wigan for nearly 30 years. It was Smith who finally articulated why the model needed to evolve: “I’m the leader of Wigan and I work full time here. How can one of us take all of this on in addition to our day jobs?” The answer was the elected mayor.
But the cooperative DNA survived the transition. When the LGA conducted its 2022 Corporate Peer Challenge of GMCA, the first combined authority reviewers said it was “hard to distinguish who they are talking about when they describe ‘we’, their own organisations, their councils, or Greater Manchester.” Staff were described as “the best public servants they had worked with in their whole career.
Greg Clark, the former Levelling Up Secretary who negotiated GM’s first devolution deal, wrote in 2024: “The Greater Manchester model relied on effective and respectful working relationships across all 10 local councils, at times led by three different political parties.” He added: “The devolution which is now spreading across the country… would not have happened without Howard Bernstein.”
This is the part of Manchesterism that doesn’t fit on a campaign poster: the cooperation model is the operating system.
A comparison with London Councils makes the point sharply. Both AGMA and London Councils were established after the abolition of metropolitan county councils, AGMA in 1986, London Councils (originally the Association of London Government) in 1995. Both are voluntary bodies representing borough leaders. But the similarity ends there. AGMA employed zero staff; this distributed model built reciprocal dependence: every council needed every other council. London Councils, by contrast, operates alongside the GLA and the Mayor of London, not instead of a strategic authority. Borough leaders have no formal decision-making role within the GLA; collaboration is entirely voluntary.
The consequences are now visible. In April 2025, all 32 London borough leaders issued a joint, cross-party call for a “Combined Board” model, essentially asking for what Greater Manchester has had for four decades. Councillor Claire Holland, chair of London Councils, stated: “We work very closely with the mayor, but because this is voluntary, there’s no hardwiring into the system of decision-making, and it can prolong the length of time.” The GLA’s Oversight Committee rejected the proposal, arguing that with 33 local authorities London was too complex: “It would clearly be unmanageable to run a strategic authority with 34 decision-making authorities.”London’s boroughs are now the only local authority leaders in England denied a formal say over the strategic authority for their region, a structural exclusion that the English Devolution and Community Empowerment Act 2026 has done nothing to address.
The irony could hardly be more pointed. London’s governance was designed from the top down: a powerful Mayor, a statutory Assembly, and boroughs that are structurally subordinate. Manchester’s was built from below: ten councils that chose to cooperate, shared responsibilities equally, and over forty years built the institutional trust that London’s thirty-two boroughs are only now trying to replicate. That the GLA itself calls the Manchester model “unmanageable” is perhaps the clearest evidence that Manchesterism cannot simply be imported. It has to be grown.
Comparative political leadership
The political diversity of governance leadership across the three city-regions is itself revealing, and it is Greater Manchester that has the strongest claim to genuine cross-party cooperation at the operational level. AGMA was explicitly designed to distribute responsibilities across all ten councils “regardless of the size of the borough or of the political parties which controlled various boroughs at any one time.” Throughout its 40-year existence, AGMA’s ten districts were simultaneously led by Labour, Conservative, and Liberal Democrat councils. Trafford was Conservative-controlled for decades until Labour took it in 2018; Stockport has been led by the Liberal Democrats for much of the last quarter-century and remains so today; Bolton, Oldham and Tameside have all experienced periods of no overall control. Yet all ten districts cooperated as co-equal partners in AGMA, jointly owning the airport, sharing statutory functions, and building the institutional trust that would become the GMCA. The elected mayoralty since 2017 has been Labour; Andy Burnham served three terms before entering Parliament, but the underlying cooperative system was always cross-party by design.
London’s experience is different. The GLA has seen genuine alternation at the top: Ken Livingstone (initially Independent, then Labour, 2000–2008), Boris Johnson (Conservative, 2008–2016), and Sadiq Khan (Labour, 2016–present), but this is alternation within a top-down mayoral system, not cross-party cooperation between boroughs. London’s 32 boroughs span the full political spectrum, from deep-red inner London Labour strongholds to solid Conservative outer suburbs in Bromley and Havering, but they have no formal decision-making role within the GLA. The political diversity exists at the borough level; it does not feed into strategic governance.
Birmingham and the West Midlands present perhaps the most volatile political landscape. Birmingham City Council has swung between Labour control (1984–2003, 2012–2026), a Conservative–Liberal Democrat coalition (2004–2012), and, following its Section 114 bankruptcy notice in 2023, a Green–Liberal Democrat–Independent minority administration since June 2026, with Reform UK as the council’s largest single party at 23 seats. Birmingham has had Labour, Conservative, and now Liberal Democrat council leaders. At the combined authority level, the West Midlands elected Conservative Andy Street as its first mayor in 2017, making it the only major English city-region to elect a non-Labour metro mayor, before narrowly replacing him with Labour’s Richard Parker in 2024 by just 1,508 votes. This political volatility reflects a city-region with political/institutional instability, a contrast with Manchester’s 40 years of accumulated cross-party trust.
The comparison makes a structural point. Manchester’s cross-party cooperation was not accidental; it was designed in by AGMA’s constitution and sustained by shared assets and rotating responsibilities that gave every council, regardless of political colour, a stake in collective success. London’s political diversity is real but structurally excluded from strategic governance. Birmingham’s diversity is increasingly dramatic but has coincided with institutional crisis rather than institutional strength. Greater Manchester remains the only English city-region where genuine cross-party collaboration was hardwired into the operating system for four decades, and where the cooperative DNA survived the transition to an elected mayor.
Individual incentives in the Manchester partnership model
There is a question that the institutional account of Manchesterism leaves unanswered: why did individual officers and councillors actually make it work? AGMA had no staff, no enforcement powers, and no performance-related pay. The ten councils were not compelled to cooperate; they chose to, year after year, for four decades. The answer lies in a set of individual incentives that are rarely discussed in the devolution literature but are central to understanding why the Greater Manchester model has proven so durable.
The first incentive is proximity to impact. The academic literature on Public Service Motivation (PSM), established by Perry (1996) and now encompassing over 700 peer-reviewed studies, consistently finds that public servants are motivated less by financial reward than by the belief that their work makes a visible difference to the communities they serve. PSM predicts higher engagement, lower turnover, and stronger organisational commitment, and these effects are amplified when workers operate at a local or place-based level where outcomes are tangible and attributable. Greater Manchester’s model placed individuals closer to change than any Whitehall-designed programme could. The staff who worked in this system were not serving a distant bureaucracy; they were shaping the place where they and their families lived. The Local Government Association’s (LGA) 2022 peer review confirmed the result: staff were described as “the best public servants they had worked with in their whole career”.
Another potential incentive is the pension fund, and it creates a virtuous circle with no parallel elsewhere in England. The Greater Manchester Pension Fund (GMPF) which funds the very officers and councillors who make the cooperative system work. When GMPF commits 5% of its portfolio, now £1.5 billion, to local investment, and that investment delivers 3,752 homes, supports 15,300 jobs, funds seven nurseries, and connects 233,000 premises to broadband, the beneficiaries include the pension fund’s own members and the communities they serve. This is not an abstract alignment of interests; it is a direct, material one. The new GMCA–GMPF strategic partnership, announced in November 2025 as the first of its kind in the country, makes this explicit. Councillor Eleanor Wills, Chair of GMPF, stated: “Projects in our Integrated Pipeline will be able to access the long-term, patient capital that pension funds can offer, while members will see their contributions support the prosperity and growth of their communities, just as they did through their working lives.” The pension fund thus creates a feedback loop: officers and councillors cooperate to build a stronger city-region; a stronger city-region improves the returns and impact of the pension fund that pays their retirement; and those visible local returns reinforce the case for continued cooperation. No other English city-region has this mechanism.
The third incentive is reputational and professional. In a system where responsibilities were deliberately rotated, every council had a stake in demonstrating competence to the other nine. This created a form of peer accountability that is more powerful than any formal performance framework. If your council hosted a function poorly, the consequences were visible to nine sets of colleagues with whom you sat around the same table every month.
The government’s 2025 Fit for the Future reforms have now institutionalised elements of this model nationally. All LGPS funds are required to set a target range for local investment in their Investment Strategy Statements, to have regard to local growth plans when setting investment strategy, and to report annually on the extent and impact of their local investments. The government’s response to the consultation was explicit: “It is in the interest of the 6.7 million hard-working LGPS members that LGPS investments support the prosperity and wellbeing of their local communities, just as members did throughout their working lives.” Greater Manchester pioneered this alignment a quarter of a century before it became national policy.
The combination is distinctive: place-based motivation reinforced by visible impact, a pension fund that turns cooperation into personal financial interest, and a peer accountability system that made every council a stakeholder in collective success. These are not formal incentives; there is no bonus scheme, no performance-related pay, no competitive league table. They are structural incentives, embedded in the architecture of cooperation itself. And they help explain why the Manchesterism model has proven not just effective, but self-reinforcing and why it has been so difficult for other city-regions to replicate without first building the institutional foundations that make these incentives possible.
From Manchester to the country: What other city-regions stand to gain
Devolution was never intended to be a Manchester-only project. Manchester’s central claim, that places, given the tools, will govern themselves better than Whitehall can govern them, is now being tested across England. And the evidence is mounting.
West Midlands has arguably the most ambitious single deal. Mayor Richard Parker’s Deeper Devolution Deal includes 100% business rates retention, a fiscal power no other combined authority outside London has achieved. In May 2026, Parker launched the Birmingham East Mayoral Development Corporation, described as “Britain’s biggest and most powerful”, 422 hectares, £11 billion of regeneration, 50,000 jobs, and 20,000 new homes. The region has also been designated a transport sandbox, allowing it to test regulatory innovations.
West Yorkshire, Mayor Tracy Brabin has secured a nearly £2 billion Integrated Settlement from 2025/26, a single funding pot replacing dozens of ring-fenced grants, modelled directly on the GM trailblazer deal. Bus franchising begins in 2027. A mass transit system is funded from 2028. In May 2026, Brabin proposed a Leeds city centre Mayoral Development Zone targeting 20,000 new homes backed by £2.1 billion in transport investment.
Liverpool City Region is bringing buses back under public control from autumn 2026, with full franchising by the end of 2027, backed by £119 million in new electric buses and infrastructure. Mayor Steve Rotheram has also secured a £1.6 billion transport settlement and is pursuing public control of Merseyrail. In December 2025, he announced Liverpool’s first Mayoral Development Corporation at the North Docks: 174 hectares, 17,700 homes, 5 million square feet of commercial space.
South Yorkshire confirmed bus franchising in March 2025 after public consultation returned 86% support, the highest of any English city-region. Mayor Oliver Coppard launched the Don Valley Corridor Mayoral Development Zone in March 2026, targeting 10,500 homes, 18,500 jobs, and a £1.3 billion economic boost.
The legislative framework now exists too. The English Devolution and Community Empowerment Act 2026 codifies principles that Greater Manchester pioneered through practice, creating a single statutory framework for strategic authorities across England. What began as voluntary cooperation between ten councils in 1986 is now, four decades later, the basis of national policy.
From Manchester to Number 10: What happens when Manchesterism goes national
On 22 June 2026, Keir Starmer resigned as Labour leader after the party lost over 1,400 councillors. Andy Burnham won the Makerfield by-election the following week, entered Parliament, and secured 322 MP nominations for the leadership. His campaign has been explicit: Manchesterism is not just a regional governance model; it is a national programme.
Burnham announced that a new “Number 10 North” office would be established in Manchester, and that the GM model — public ownership of essential services, place-based investment, fiscal devolution — would form the blueprint for national policy. Specific commitments include a national Hive Homes programme, public control of water and energy utilities, business rates devolution to all strategic authorities, a social care levy, and electoral reform.
The Cambridge Bennett School of Public Policy has identified three structural challenges. First, prioritisation: the GM model was built over forty years; a prime minister has five. Second, party management: Manchesterism is cross-party by design; the Parliamentary Labour Party is not. Third, and most fundamental, the paradox of centralised decentralisation, using the power of Number 10 to give power away, requires a kind of political discipline that Westminster has never sustained. Laura Hughes at LBC has argued that the real test will be fiscal autonomy: “If Burnham becomes PM and doesn’t give cities the tax-raising powers London has, then Manchesterism will have failed on its own terms.”
That is the right question. Manchesterism was built from below, through voluntary cooperation, shared assets, and institutional trust accumulated over four decades. Its greatest achievement is not any single policy, but the proof that English cities can govern themselves when given the chance. Other places need to match this level of co-operation, co-production and partnership (as the LPIP Hub and City-REDI would advocate); without this, other places will find it difficult to match the levels of trust. There is also a risk that No10 North fragments or undermines Manchester’s core strength of partnership working. What Manchester has never had is the fiscal architecture to match that strength; neither has anywhere else. If Burnham now controls the levers that could provide it, the test is whether he pulls them, not for Manchester, but for everywhere.
References
Parkinson M. (2023) Stronger Things: The Greater Manchester Story. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Richards, D. and Warner, S. (2026) The Myth of Treasury Control. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
This blog was written by Rebecca Riley, Professor for Enterprise, Engagement and Impact, City-REDI, University of Birmingham and the Director of the LPIP Hub, with assistance from AI.
Find out more about the Local Policy Innovation Partnership Hub.
Disclaimer:
The views expressed in this post are those of the author and not necessarily those of City-REDI or the University of Birmingham.