Our approach

We work together for the common good. We’ve learned that creating inclusive growth is a joint venture and in Greater Manchester every bit of the system plays its part at every level – from neighbourhood to region wide. Our uniquely mature and ever strengthening system unites all sectors – public, private, academic, voluntary, community, faith and social enterprise - under a single shared vision, and we include the voices, ideas and capacity of residents in our work. By harnessing the best talents across institutions and partners, we create the conditions for bold, collective leadership.

Our success is built on collaboration, cooperation and participation. Instead of competing against each other, we pull together, using the lived and learned experiences of our people to shape policy; understanding each other, investing in new relationships, and protecting long-established mature ones.

This helps us to maximise investment opportunities and meet the greatest challenges facing our region and our country. This philosophy has rippled through all sectors, creating a city region system where power is shared and everyone points in the same direction. It enables us to respond as a single system to the challenges we face and to reform and improve how we work.

Across Greater Manchester – in regional bodies, councils, the NHS, criminal justice system, businesses, our social, civic and community organisations and beyond – we share both the power and the accountability for achieving our collective vision. We share risks too and hold each other to account, providing rigorous and constructive challenge, informed by data and deep local knowledge.

We’re committed to continually strengthening our collaborative approach by developing new processes to ensure people can participate fully in planning and delivery. For example, this strategy was written with input from hundreds of individuals and groups representing many different parts of Greater Manchester life.

In everything we do, we work to tackle the three forms of inequality set out in the Greater Manchester Independent Inequalities Commission’s report:

1. 1. Spatial inequalities: between people living in different places
   2. Demographic inequalities: between groups of people with different characteristics
   3. Socio-economic inequalities: this covers not only inequalities in income and education, but unequal access to the resources people need to live well and inequalities of power that leave people with less control over the things that matter to them.

Our approach to tackling disadvantage and discrimination is framed around increasing three things: equity, equality and inclusion.

Equity - ensuring all people have access to the same opportunities. In particular, we have made a strong commitment to being leaders in race equality and have developed a Race Equity Framework. Priorities have been co-produced with local communities and include leadership of race equity; being accountable to communities; the commitment of resources; removal of barriers and transparent, data-led performance management.

Equality - we ensure that the voices of all our communities are heard. We do this through our network of Inclusion Panels supported by Greater Manchester Combined Authority. The Panels seek to drive forward positive action and overcome structural barriers by raising understanding of the issues for those they represent, sharing best practice and providing peer support and challenge. Vibrant staff networks and an ambitious programme of reverse mentoring between senior managers in the public sector - including some of our council Chief Executives - and staff from under represented groups help embed this approach.

We are also working hard to improve the representation in the public sector workforce through a new set of People Inclusion Standards which address training, recruitment standards and retention initiatives. In addition we are now supporting our third cohort of development programmes for both future civic leaders and senior managers from underrepresented groups.

The Good Employment Charter (external website) provides a framework to support employers in creating inclusive and socially responsible workplaces.

Inclusion – we seek to harness an inclusive environment across our city region, where everyone feels welcome. We celebrate key events across the city region such as Black History Month, Pride celebrations in each of our districts and events with the Gypsy Roma and Traveller and other minoritised communities. We are also pioneers of specialist research, such as through our Ageing in Place Pathfinder work, which has attracted international attention, and are supporting pilot activity to tackle loneliness and isolation in older people.

We will track our progress in tackling the structural, institutional and interpersonal manifestations of inequality by measuring our key performance indicators by protected characteristic. Where possible, we’ll set tangible targets to drive improvements in outcomes for people who experience marginalisation.

And our spatial plan and economic policy is designed to promote growth across Greater Manchester, so our most successful areas continue to thrive while those doing less well can fulfil their potential. This evidence-based approach helps us target delivery to the places and groups that most need support.

We are held to account for this work through the Greater Manchester Tackling Inequalities Board, where all our Panel Chairs meet with decision makers and the equality impact assessment of every policy change across Greater Manchester is considered.

Our commitment to respect, dignity, and compassion is part of who we are. We’ve seen this over the past decade in our collective efforts to ensure no one goes hungry and in our work to end homelessness.

We stand up to racism and discrimination in all its forms, building on Greater Manchester’s long and proud history of championing equality, celebrating diversity and welcoming people from around the world. We are known for our decency and work to build a fairer society. Our diverse and inclusive culture is one of the reasons why people want to live, work, play, visit, and invest in our city region.

We take a strengths-based and person-centred approach, lifting people up and harnessing their talent and resources and, where they need it, supporting them to live well. We’re developing a culture of preventing issues from arising or escalating, providing support so people can tackle the root causes of problems, growing everyone's sense of agency, so people feel in control of their own lives, with a say in how services are run and decisions that affect their lives and communities.

Our people are what make our places thrive, and we invest in them, so they can do things for themselves and actively participate in shaping their neighbourhoods and communities. We build trust and confidence by listening to our people, involving them in policy and decision making and getting to know them as names, not numbers, so we can provide tailored support and create the conditions for them to live a good life. We will evaluate what people think about how this is being achieved through our residents’ survey and other local means of gathering views and perspectives, including our #BeeWell survey and other ways of engaging with young people, along with the plans being developed for evaluating our approach to enabling people to live well.

We take a long-term approach to policy making, considering the impact today’s decisions will have on future generations’ wellbeing. We will continue this approach in the coming years, factoring the hopes, concerns and needs of children and young people, and those not yet born, as well as those growing older, into all our plans. This means testing every policy with an intergenerational lens, considering how it will impact people in decades to come, and whether it will reduce or entrench existing inequity. Advances in AI are likely make it easier than ever to plan for the needs of future generations, by modelling scenarios, using data to simulate future generations’ outcomes and providing ethical nudging tools to reduce short-termism and generational bias.

Through our ten councils and our diverse networks of partners, we are deeply engaged with our towns and cities. Our delivery plans will ensure that services are delivered at the most appropriate geographical level, incorporating locality-led plans developed from deep knowledge of the communities and people they serve. We will evaluate the extent to which place is the focus of decision-making, plans, and activity.

We have pioneered a bottom-up form of governance where the power is shared and our ten council leaders and the mayor are members of the GMCA, enabling a whole place approach. We work together to ensure that services are planned and delivered across the whole of Greater Manchester or within localities, as appropriate, building on our collaborative multi-sector partnerships.

We are committed to developing neighbourhood working for geographical areas of 30-50K people, where multi-agency teams from across sectors work together towards shared outcomes and purposes alongside people and communities – the heart of our approach to supporting people to live well. We will continually review the extent to which our local areas are the focus of decision-making, plans, and delivery to ensure we benefit all our residents.

We work with city regions across the north and the rest of England and have formed strong relationships with successive Governments and the devolved administrations of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. We undertake regular overseas missions and have formed close links with other global cities – from Osaka in Japan to Lviv in Ukraine and Austin in Texas. We’re part of Bloomberg Harvard’s City Leadership Initiative, which aims to equip mayors and city leaders to tackle complex challenges and improve residents’ quality of life.

We want to make the best-informed decisions about the things we directly deliver, or that we support or influence the delivery of, for our people, places and businesses. So, we use data and evidence to determine what is to be done, how it should be done, and to monitor progress and change course if needed, drawing on robust, appropriate, and timely information. We will ensure that this continues to be the focus of our decision-making and delivery.

Central to our approach is a long-term focus on evidence-based decision-making. In 2009, we commissioned the Manchester Independent Economic Review - a rigorous assessment of the state and future potential of our economy. In 2019, the Greater Manchester Independent Prosperity Review provided further data and insights. And in 2020, the Independent Inequalities Commission undertook a six-month investigation, measuring inequalities across the city region and considering how best to tackle them. Its recommendations have helped shape this strategy.

In 2023, we worked with The Resolution Foundation on their report, A Tale of Two Cities, to quantify the productivity gap separating Greater Manchester and London and to find new ways to reduce it. We revisit key data regularly to ensure the impact of events like Brexit and the Covid pandemic are factored into our economic plans. This approach has laid the foundations for a decade of remarkable growth.

Decision making at our monthly Combined Authority meeting is rooted in up-to-the-minute data as well as insight from our equality panels. And since December 2020, we’ve spoken with more than 30,000 people through regular residents’ surveys, and around 100,000 young people via #BeeWell, the largest engagement exercise of its type in the country. What they’ve told us about their real-life experience – from housing and health to food, policing and transport – has shaped our policies.

We also want services to be seamless, well designed, and easy to use, like the “tap in and tap out” system for buses and trams or other public services where people only need to provide their information once. So, we’re harnessing the power of data, using it responsibly, safely, and securely, driving constant improvement through collaboration with Government, residents and communities, industry and universities. This is underpinned by our investment in, and plans for further development of, digital technology which supports the use of data, both nationally and locally.

It has never been more important to make the best of all our resources – financial, physical and those of our people. Increasing demand for public services and decreasing resources means that this is the time to ensure we use what we have effectively, to enable the best use of public and private funds for the benefit of our people, but also to ensure we deliver the greatest possible impact from investments and activities. It is about making a difference for Greater Manchester and drawing on all the resource available to do this. 

This means that we must make challenging decisions about how we allocate the resources available to us, whilst ensuring that we continue to address inequality as well as the needs of our localities and communities. Our integrated settlement gave Greater Manchester even greater freedom and flexibility to allocate resources, but we must still allocate and use them effectively.

We need to make the most of what we have. Improving how we use resources, and employing innovative approaches to increase effectiveness, will be key to making the best use of our collective resources. We will continue to increase our capacity to deliver impactfully and efficiently through increased use of digital approaches where appropriate, including everyone in the opportunities they bring. How and where we spend our money is also key. We will ensure that our procurement practices are fair and enable social value so that everyone benefits.

Making a difference through the impact of our work is crucial. All our work must consider and demonstrate its impact fairly and appropriately across the whole of Greater Manchester and at all levels. Evaluation is an integral part of our work, and this will assess our impact. We will increasingly draw on a range of data, and innovative methods of analysing data, in order to demonstrate both effective use of resources and the impact of our work. We will draw on established measures of productivity and effectiveness, including those in our performance framework, as well as qualitative insight and the use of the experience in our Tackling Inequalities Board.