Greater Manchester Combined Authority (GMCA) responded last week to the Prime Minister\u2019s reference to greater devolution for England\u2019s larger cities in the wake of the Scottish referendum results.<\/p>\n
The Prime Minister said, “it is important that we have wider civic engagement about how to improve governance in our United Kingdom, including how to empower our great cities. And we will say more about this in the coming days.”<\/p>\n
Lord Peter Smith, Chair of Greater Manchester Combined Authority, said “We welcome the Prime Minister’s words about the need to empower our great cities\u2026 Greater Manchester has the experience and capability to move quickly.<\/p>\n
“Greater Manchester has a bigger economy than Wales or Northern Ireland, and a population of almost three million, yet we have considerably less freedom over our funding and spending priorities.\u201d<\/p>\n
ResPublica, an independent public policy think tank published a report prior to the Scottish referendum outlining a blue print for full devolution for English cities, using Greater Manchester as the case in point.<\/p>\n
The report \u2018Devo Max \u2013 Devo Manc<\/em>\u2019 outlines the case that the GMCA with an elected major and assembly, as is the model in London, could have control over such things as property and income taxes.<\/p>\n \u201cWe put forward Greater Manchester for full place-based integration of public sector spend because with its well evidenced growth potential and mature governance structures, it is one of the few places in the UK that could pilot devolution on this scale.\u201d<\/p>\n According to Scott Fletcher MBE, of ANS group, the report by ResPublica makes perfect sense. In a recent statement he said, \u201cManchester is in\u00a0a commanding position\u00a0at the moment. High tech companies and aspiring entrepreneurs aren\u2019t confined solely to London and, indeed, often find more fertile ground elsewhere, such as Manchester and the North West.\u201d<\/p>\n He added \u201cManchester is a vibrant and growing city and if we get the devolution of power that appears to now be politically possible then our great city and the wider North West can only benefit, giving us powers over a wide range of issues such as health, education and business support. I say bring it on, viva the Republic of Mancunia.\u201d<\/p>\n Lord Smith added that he believes Manchester is “uniquely well-placed to demonstrate the benefits of greater freedom to make decisions and funding allocations which will help the region realise its full potential.\u201d<\/p>\n We need the freedom to make decisions on funding and priorities based on the area\u2019s needs, not the \u2018one size fits all\u2019 approaches handed down from Westminster and Whitehall.\u201d<\/p>\n Ed Miliband proposes, as outlined in his speech at last week\u2019s Labour conference in Manchester, \u201cdevolving power to local government, bringing power closer to people right across England\u201d adding \u201cIt\u2019s got to be led by the people. It can\u2019t be a Westminster stitch-up.\u201d<\/p>\n At the Labour party conference last week, ten city leaders signed a letter to the first Secretary of State William Hague asking for speedy devolution to cities across the UK.<\/p>\n The eight English Core Cities\u2014Birmingham, Bristol, Liverpool, Leeds, Manchester, Newcastle, Nottingham and Sheffield\u2014have recently been joined by Cardiff and Glasgow, forming \u2018Core Cities UK\u2019.<\/p>\n The leaders welcome the Prime Ministers recent promises of more \u2018empowered\u2019 UK cities. But they say \u2018our communities, our voters, will not accept delay based on constitutional wrangles, or half measure delivered through political compromise.\u201d<\/p>\n In the letter issued to Hague the leaders outline that the \u201cten Core Cities deliver 28% of the English Welsh and Scottish economy.”<\/p>\n By 2030, the original eight English Core Cities alone could put 1.16 million jobs and \u00a3222 billion extra into the economy.\u201d which they added is \u201clike adding the entire economy of Demark to the UK\u2014with Glasgow and Cardiff onside it will be even more.\u201d<\/p>\n However these improvements they say \u201ccannot be met by our heavily centralised and overly bureaucratic systems of investment.\u201d<\/p>\n The leaders added that the \u201ctiming should not restrict the promises to Scotland being delivered\u201d but that the \u201cthe people of Scotland have decided that devolution and Union are not incompatible, and neither is local freedom and national growth.\u201d<\/p>\n Manchester Evening News<\/em> reported that Lucy Powell, MP for Manchester Central thinks \u201cwe are ready\u201d for devolution but that we must first tackle the problem of poor election turnouts.<\/p>\n The report highlighted that Ms. Powell was elected after a turnout of just 18 per cent in 2012. However she believes that the referendum with an 84.6 per cent turnout demonstrated people will engage in politics if they feel they have control over the places they live.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" In the wake of the Scottish referendum Manchester Leaders call for more powers to be devolved away from Westminster.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1446,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[9240,9241,9242,9243],"coauthors":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mancunion.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12457"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mancunion.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mancunion.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mancunion.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1446"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mancunion.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12457"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mancunion.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12457\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mancunion.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12457"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mancunion.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12457"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mancunion.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12457"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mancunion.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=12457"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}