From its highest point, the Georgian-era observatory at Heaton Park, you can see the limits of the megacity that will be created by “Devo Manc”. Do a quick 180-degree panorama with your smartphone and you’ll find that a metropolis of 2.8 million people does not even fill the photograph.
By 21st-century standards, the new Greater Manchester Combined Authority (GMCA) created by David Cameron’s government in 2014 is too small. Yet compared with the city’s political traditions, it is way too big. Even after two centuries of consolidation, it takes 10 local councils to run the place – two of them already titled “city”.
When they looked at the strategic plan for Greater Manchester, presented in 2014, many local people were struck by the same thought: there was scant provision for democracy. There will be an elected mayor – Labour’s Andy Burnham is the odds-on favourite – and a committee formed of 10 elected council leaders. And that’s it.
When they scrutinised the 17 strategic objectives further, says local businessman David Fernandez-Arias, other flaws became obvious: “It’s economy first, and the understandable belief that wealth trickles down if you get that right.” There was a nod to the creation of “green jobs”, but no comprehensive environmental strategy. So, campaign groups across Greater Manchester decided to draw up a “people’s plan”. Its two objectives are to increase democratic control over the new mega-authority, and to broaden the strategy beyond economics.
“We want to bend the strategy so that it ends up, instead of standing on one leg – the economy - it stands on four: social, environmental, economic and democratic,” says Fernandez-Arias.
At present, the People’s Plan is at the design phase. There is an online form you can fill in to indicate your preferred choice of priorities in transport or social care provision. And there’s a round of meetings scheduled. Based on that, a team including experts from Manchester Business School will put together a plan to be handed to the incoming mayor.
But although Burnham is making sympathetic noises, the political culture of north-west England has been staunchly top-down for more than a century. In that culture, it was for councillors to decide and provide, the people to elect them and for the deep detail of what happens next to end up in the small print of newspapers that no longer exist.
But the People’s Plan is a good idea, and even the exercise of completing the campaign’s brief questionnaire shows where it could lead. Do you focus investment on city transport grids or intercity ones? Do you want to spread new housing developments or put them in the town centres? Do you want a big local energy provider, or several small ones?
Even for resource-neutral questions such as these, the existing local government structures of the UK exclude most people from the choice. So, in a way, by designing Devo Manc without an elected assembly, the Conservatives have opened up the possibility of a big democratic experiment from below.
But it’s on the big, money-heavy decisions that most people are focused. In 2017, the GMCA gets control of a combined health-and-social-care budget of £6bn. The problem is that’s £2bn short of what it will need by 2020. Local health experts calculate about a third of the gap can be closed by central funding, leaving the rest to be plugged through “productivity” and heroic improvements in public health.
The irony is, by allowing communities, health unions and user groups to take control of the local health priorities, Greater Manchester would stand a better chance of achiveving the desired “efficiencies”: first by getting local buy in and second because the solutions would be more intelligently designed. Instead, on the point of assuming office, Burnham – former Health Secretary at Westminster – is going to be in a world of fiscal pain.
The People’s Plan – to work properly – needs its own resources. You need to build local communities’ capacity to participate in democracy; not just in cold halls on rainy Novemember nights, but through online participation.
In Madrid, where a coalition backed by the radical-left Podemos party governs, the mayor has earmarked €60m (£54m) of spending as a “participatory budget”, to be decided through online polling, with proposals submitted via local assemblies. In the latest round, €24m has been allocated on local projects as varied as a centre for people with Alzheimer’s, municipal nurseries, tree planting and the restoration of fountains and urinals.
What’s striking about Madrid and the other left-controlled Spanish cities is the way local identities and the big metropolis can be made to fit together. The mass meetings where the mayor stands being questioned and occasionally harangued represent historic districts: small local government units the size of a real community.
It’s no accident that, when Manchester was the centre of the world economy, decision-making took place at the level of towns and parishes. Leigh, where I grew up, was created as a single borough only in 1899, out of three separate parish councils. That disappeared in 1972 to become part of Wigan, which will now be subsumed into the GMCA.
Whoever becomes mayor will find, in the in-tray, requests for a big event to celebrate the Peterloo massacre, whose bicentenary falls in August 2019. Local activists are already thinking about period-costume parades from the 16 towns whose workers participated in the mass movement of 1819. But the best memorial to Peterloo would be to turn Manchester into the first UK city where participatory democracy is given money, time and space. The mayor’s first act should be to scrap the strategic plan inherited from the Cameron era and throw its replacement open to a process of collaborative design.
And he should – as in Madrid – allocate a significant portion of the city’s budget to proposals suggested by and for the people, and decided by online voting. And not just Manchester. If the incoming Labour mayors can get it right, people’s planning could transform the political culture of our towns and cities.