Greater Manchester is in a “unique” position to recover from Covid-19 - and thanks to its makeup is the 海角视频’s best placed city region to build back better from the crisis, a leading business figure has said.
Lou Cordwell OBE, chair of the GM Local Enterprise Partnership (LEP), is confident the region will get back to its thriving pre-pandemic state and more, adding that its businesses had responded with “tenacity and resilience”.
Ms Cordwell, who is CEO of design studio Magnetic North, also gave her reaction to the Chancellor’s Budget announced earlier this week - warning despite policies like furlough being extended, the region may yet see further job cuts.
She said: “I take my hat off to businesses who in the most extraordinary circumstances are surviving and in some cases, growing.
“You've got to absolutely admire the sheer tenacity and resilience of business to remodel itself and rethink how it delivers its goods and services from cafes to coffee shops through to retailers.
“Here in GM, we’ve shown tonnes of innovation, because that's what we do well.”
Ms Cordwell said she remains very confident in the city region’s ability to ‘build back better’, a now-renowned phrase she said was being used in Manchester from April 2020 - well before being uttered by the Prime Minister.
Earlier this week, Mark Haywood of law firm CMS said Manchester is well placed for recovery, partly because it isn’t reliant on a few key sectors. He said that while leisure and retail have suffered, the ability of the city’s real estate and rapidly develop digital and media sectors to continue during lockdown have helped limit further damage
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Ms Cordwell struck a similar tone, also highlighting the “massive contrast” in how city firms have been hit by Covid.
She said she hoped a combination of an improving positive economic forecast combined with extra support being made available to businesses will aid recovery - and she has particular high hopes for the future of our city region.
She said: “I think GM is in a particularly unique position, because we do public-private very well. The reality is you get yourself out of these situations through a combination of business, public sector, voluntary and social working together in a very tightly knit way - and that’s what we have.
“Right from the beginning, we said ‘the good aspect of things falling apart is that you can put them back together in a different shape’.
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“We absolutely see this as a reset moment. Our economic vision talks about getting out on the other side of this and moving onto something better - that works better for people and works better for the planet. That means not going back to the way things were.”
Referring to key workers, Ms Cordwell said one of the positives of the pandemic had been the spotlight on the “swathes” of people who are critical to our wellbeing - “but don’t get looked after or paid very well”. That’s as well as increasing discourse about the environment and green initiatives.
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Ms Cordwell said: “We've been able to step off the treadmill and ask ourselves ‘is this what we actually want? Or do we want to go make something different from the other side of this?’
“In GM, we're very clear about that definition of success - of wanting something that doesn't go back to the way things were, because there was a lot wrong with it. We want to take forward that spirit of innovation - rewiring things and completely redesigning industries and rethinking the way that we do things.
“I think we're in probably the best place of any city region in the 海角视频 to do that, because we're wired in a particular way.
“We've got controls that other places don't have, we've got a very strong-spirited business community here that wants to make that happen and has pulled together.
“I am hugely optimistic that we can come out of it in a way that would be modelled to be more modern, more progressive.”
With Manchester city centre a key economic driver behind the wider region, Ms Cordwell said she could not predict how the pandemic will change its makeup or appearance in 20 or 30 years.
But she said: “As Manchester always does, as the original modern city, it will continue to reinvent what cities mean.
“That's taking place right before our eyes, but I think the fact we're seeing large tech businesses choosing Manchester as their HQ and coming to the city centres because they like its vibrancy, and young people wanting to come and visit the place, is very promising indeed.
“I think Manchester city centre will always have a really important part to play in our pan-GM story, but it's absolutely inevitable that in 10 or 20 years it is going to be markedly different than it is now.”
Ms Cordwell, chair of the LEP, which supports business and local authorities to grow the private sector, also gave her reaction to Chancellor Rishi Sunak’s Spring Budget announced on Wednesday.
She said it was a "mostly positive” announcement, despite some inevitable gaps including in new green initiatives.
She welcomed the extension of both furlough and the business rates relief holiday, as well as the introduction of ‘restart loans’ for hospitality and retail.
Commenting on the furlough changes, with the scheme now set to run until September, she said: “It’s been productive for employers and employees and obviously we want to keep people in gainful employment as long as we can, but also make sure that talent pipeline is there when businesses are ready to switch back on.
“Furlough's been really successful, and whilst we've seen a reduction in furloughed numbers in GM, we have still got a significant number of people on it, so that was really good news.”
Despite the positives, Ms Cordwell could not rule out the possibility of the region’s firms continuing to cut jobs.
She said: “You can't possibly [rule it out] - because we also know at the same time people are wrestling with cash. This is not just three months of lockdown. Here in GM, we are now 12 months into this.
“So I think there's lots of pressure - something the Chancellor tried to alleviate.
“But we've got to recognise that people have possibly already taken one round of loans, they've already been through an incredibly difficult time and they're trying to motivate the workforce who are tired and worried, not to mention they themselves as business leaders. So I think we are trying very hard to wrap some support around those people.
“We've got to recognise how business has done an incredible job just to stay afloat. For those still standing here after going through some of those challenges, many have been to hell and back to make that happen.
“In Manchester, it's an even bigger ask, in some ways, because of how long we have been living under restrictions.”
Tax on company profits was raised in the Budget from 19% to 25% - a policy Ms Cordwell said had been inevitable “at some point”.
But she said what was pleasing about the policy was how it will protect SMEs - something that will be of great help to GM.
“We know that small business and micro business is going to play a massively important part of our economic recovery, so to see that policy weighted with protection I thought was really positive.”
Ms Cordwell welcomed the announcements of a new Treasury office in Darlington and infrastructure bank in Leeds - and did not begrudge the fact Manchester and the North West were not chosen for the two ‘levelling up’ initiatives.
“The levelling up agenda is seen as a pan-northern thing rather than a micro-geographical opportunity,” she said.
“We all want to see the North do well, and we need investment in order to deliver on that.
“Levelling up is not about short-term support, which we know is important, but is going to come from much longer-term seeds that are sown around big infrastructure investments.
“The conversations still to come are what are the things we're going to do over the next two years that are going to really reap the rewards in 20 and 30 years, because that's really where the levelling up is going to come from.”