There is a legitimate debate to be had about Manchester City Football Club, the Premier League’s financial rules and the conduct of the club’s owners. There is also a legitimate debate about how Manchester attracts international investment, how public-private partnerships are structured and whether the benefits of regeneration are shared widely enough. But they are not the same debate, and over recent days that distinction has become increasingly blurred. A football controversy has become the catalyst for a much broader attack on Manchester’s regeneration model, its relationship with investors, Manchester Life and, inevitably, Andy Burnham. Some scrutiny is perfectly reasonable, but some of the claims being made are misleading and risk rewriting one of the most significant urban regeneration stories in modern Britain.
I say that as a Scouser who has watched Manchester’s progress over several decades with a combination of admiration and envy. Through Downtown in Business, I work across many of the UK’s major cities, and there is no question that Manchester has become a blueprint for others. That did not happen because Manchester City started winning Premier League titles, nor did Manchester’s renaissance begin when Sheikh Mansour arrived in 2008. The regeneration of East Manchester was already underway, the Commonwealth Games had provided a major catalyst, and successive civic leaders had established something many other cities struggled to achieve: a long-term economic strategy based on strong public-private partnerships, international investment and a determination not to wait for Whitehall to solve Manchester’s problems.
The arrival of significant Abu Dhabi investment undoubtedly accelerated parts of that regeneration, but it did not invent it. That distinction is particularly important when considering some of the criticism now being directed at Manchester Life. Reading certain commentary, you could be forgiven for believing Manchester simply handed valuable public land to Abu Dhabi investors, received little in return and watched developers walk away with the proceeds. That is a caricature of a partnership established between Manchester City Council and Abu Dhabi United Group to accelerate residential development in Ancoats and New Islington, areas that had long been regeneration priorities but still contained substantial amounts of derelict and underused land.
Manchester Life subsequently delivered around 1,500 homes across nine developments, helped bring historic buildings back into productive use, created commercial space and contributed to the transformation of neighbourhoods that are almost unrecognisable from twenty years ago. Of course, there are legitimate questions about the model. Could more affordable housing have been delivered? Could greater value have been extracted from particular sites? Were development opportunities sufficiently competitive? Those are reasonable questions, but they are very different from suggesting Manchester Life amounted to a giveaway.
One of the weaknesses in some of the criticism is the tendency to judge regeneration as if it were simply a property transaction. The value to a city of developing derelict or underused land is not measured solely by comparing its historic value with a hypothetical price that might have been achieved through another disposal process. The proper assessment must also consider what development unlocked: new homes, residents, businesses, council tax, business rates, employment, rising confidence, improvements to the surrounding area and further private investment. Go to Ancoats and New Islington today and the physical evidence of that transformation is difficult to ignore. None of this means every decision was correct or that Manchester Life should be immune from scrutiny, but there is a considerable difference between legitimate scrutiny and retrospective accountancy stripped of the wider purpose and economics of regeneration.
More importantly, Manchester Life was never the Manchester economic model; it was one component of it. The city’s transformation has been built over decades through transport, culture, universities, sport, property, inward investment, tourism, technology, professional services and an unusually mature relationship between civic and business leadership. That progress spans different governments, different investors and different political leaders. It is therefore particularly odd to see the current Manchester City controversy morph into a wider attack on Andy Burnham and, from there, an assault on the credibility of Manchester’s growth story.
There is an important fact that gets lost in that narrative. Manchester Life was established in 2014. Burnham did not become Mayor of Greater Manchester until 2017. He should absolutely be challenged on decisions he has made and comments he makes today, including his views about Manchester City’s owners, but retrospectively making him responsible for every agreement entered into by Manchester before he became mayor is plainly unreasonable. It is also reasonable to ask why a dispute about football regulation has expanded so rapidly into an attack on regeneration projects, investment decisions and political leadership. Is this genuinely about Manchester City and football governance, or has the controversy provided a convenient opportunity for those who want to damage Burnham to question the wider economic success story with which modern Manchester has become associated?
We should be capable of holding two thoughts at the same time. Manchester City must operate within the rules governing English football and face the appropriate consequences where breaches are ultimately established through the proper processes. Equally, investment associated with the club’s ownership has made a substantial contribution to the regeneration of East Manchester. Recognising the second does not require excusing the first, and pretending otherwise does nothing to improve either the football debate or our understanding of how cities regenerate.
There is a wider national lesson here too. Britain desperately needs investment in homes, infrastructure, transport, energy, innovation and communities that have suffered decades of economic decline. Government cannot finance all of that, which means private and international capital will be essential. Manchester understood this earlier than many places. Its civic leaders travelled the world selling their city, built relationships with investors and used public intervention to unlock private capital. Not every deal will have been perfect, but find me a city that has regenerated itself over thirty years without making mistakes and I will show you a city that exists only in a PowerPoint presentation.
Manchester should be scrutinised precisely because there are lessons to learn from it. Liverpool, Birmingham, Leeds, Newcastle and other ambitious cities should examine what worked, what did not and what could be done better. But learning from Manchester requires an accurate account of what Manchester actually did, rather than allowing today’s controversy to rewrite yesterday’s history.
Football controversies should be dealt with by football’s regulators. Regeneration agreements should be judged on their facts, politicians should be challenged for decisions for which they were actually responsible, and Manchester’s transformation should be assessed across decades rather than through the prism of a particularly febrile week of headlines.
As a Scouser, saying Manchester has got everything right does not come naturally to me. It hasn’t. But pretending that it got everything wrong because Manchester City is embroiled in controversy would be equally absurd. Manchester has been one of Britain’s great urban success stories. We should scrutinise it and learn from it, but we should not allow football politics – or political opportunism – to rewrite it.
