Opinion

Northern growth? – joined up thinking is what we need

Mike Blackburn, chair, NW LEP

Collaboration is the key to sustainable growth in the North West says Greater Manchester Local Enterprise Partnership (LEP) chairman Mike Blackburn.

What businesses are after is certainty, understanding and better information on what is happening across the board; why do Government’s priorities today, matter for the medium to long-term and vice-versa?  Connecting our short term activity to long term vision is really important and not everywhere has – or at least always understands the rationale behind - that long term view. And then those plans need to be communicated.

"What we suffer from at the moment is short term planning and projects, which are driven by current short term funding arrangements.  They may be well intentioned projects but they don’t feel well connected by some kind of high level master plan.  It can feel a bit like a land of unintended consequences. Good gets done but this can sometimes unintentionally make things worse elsewhere."

In the North West there is an organisation called the North West Business Leadership Team.  This group of business leaders is often called upon to give its views on significant aspects of plans for the North West.  In the last two years it has published four significant reports, one of which was on transport.  This outlined the short, medium and long term priorities for transport in the North West. On the back of that report we had a meeting with the Department for Transport (DfT) a few weeks ago, where we outlined the business views on infrastructure, and stressed the importance of integration of transport plans and schemes - of having a longer 20-50 year aspirational plan rather than working to control periods of only five years, so that more can be delivered on the bigger scale.

When it comes to high speed rail a lot of businesses understandably don’t want to invest their time in thinking about something that is possibly 15- 20 years away. They want to hear what is happening today.  We told the DfT that its existing communications could also benefit from improved integration. It’s common to hear from businesses in and around Greater Manchester for example, that the focus on high speed rail from London to Manchester is not their priority – they might want the A556 upgraded, or better capacity / faster journey times across the city’s existing rail network.

Actually what DfT should be saying is that high speed rail connects many of the current transport initiatives together, and by having this project underway, we can ensure there is a much wider impact on localised issues for business journeys, as well as social and leisure journeys .  It’s not a case of either/or, we need both.

What we suffer from at the moment is short term planning and projects, which are driven by current short term funding arrangements.  They may be well intentioned projects but they don’t feel well connected by some kind of high level master plan.  It can feel a bit like a land of unintended consequences. Good gets done but this can sometimes unintentionally make things worse elsewhere.

As the LEP we have set out goals in our latest Greater Manchester Growth Deal, agreed in July 2014, with one of the objectives being to improve long term integrated planning between rail, roads, sea and airports. In the past, and still today, multiple agencies all with different priorities are all short term based because they work in short control periods and therefore cannot easily invest in a long term future.

This is already starting to change with the One North activity and the new Transport for the North body. It is made up of local authorities, business leaders, the Highways Agency, the DfT, Network Rail;  a complete mix of parties looking at how to make rail, road, sea and air strategically advantageous for the north as a whole and not just each sector's individual needs. But this applies to other infrastructure too. We are trying to encourage providers to think about working more closely with investors and developers at a much earlier stage of thinking, to ensure that plans can be integrated and all of the benefits can be gained.

 

For a full interview with Mike Blackburn see issue the forthcoming March issue of Infrastructure Intelligence