Governing Manchester's unruly poor in an era of austerity

The presentation aims to explore a framework for considering a developing policy agenda being built in Manchester which may well form a blueprint for other urban areas in the UK as we move into an era in which public spending is drastically reduced. For a number of years Manchester has begun to operate more as a ‘city region’ and although this has often seemed abstract and divorced from everyday urban life, it may become more prominent as massive public spending cuts are imposed and the coalition government enables a permissive ‘localist’ agenda.

Central to Manchester’s proposals for City Regional policy, is a more interventionist approach to dealing with "problem" social groups (primarily low income communities/families) who experience material deprivation and are divorced from the labour market. The range of new approaches being developed in Manchester by the public policy community is closely allied to a) the project of developing a more city regional approach to governing Manchester; b) concern to make the city's economy more 'competitive' and to better integrate deprived groups into it; c) the spatial constraints imposed by the administrative boundaries of Manchester (city region) and the particular configuration of its housing stock; d) the concern to 'reform' public services in order to achieve (b), but also more recently to save money which is part of a game to play Manchester beneficially into the national zeitgeist of cuts, fiscal austerity and 'big society'.

At the moment the 'city region policy' takes the form of pilot areas testing these approaches by reforming existing services for Early Years (age 0-3) in a relatively explicit acknowledgement that older generations are 'lost' and that intervention is needed to 'break the cycle'. But these approaches don't come from nowhere and are based on a long history of Manchester-dominated projects (eg rebalancing/gentrifying neighbourhoods and the housing stock), and very stable consensus emanating from the City’s leadership. If these trends are confirmed with the national government’s lack of centrally-defined social policy, and commitment to ‘Localism’, the UK could for the first time since the creation of the Welfare State witness the development of distinctively municipal social policy.

Dr Rees' web page