Introduction
David Marlow [00:02]
After four decades of institutional churn in English regeneration, have mayors finally found a delivery vehicle that sticks?
Mike Spicer [00:12]
Or are Mayoral Development Corporations just the latest arm's-length body to promise transformation before being wound up? I'm Mike Spicer…
David Marlow [00:21]
…and I'm David Marlow. Welcome to LED Confidential, the podcast that tries to lift the lid on those intractable, enduring challenges facing those of us working in and on local economic development and placemaking today.
Mayoral Development Corporations by the numbers
Mike Spicer [00:35]
So, David, let's start with the numbers. For years after the Localism Act created them, Mayoral Development Corporations, or MDCs, were a London device: the Olympic Legacy Corporation and Old Oak and Park Royal. Then Ben Houchen in the North East set up one for South Tees in 2017, and Stockport followed in 2019 as the first inner city region. By the House of Commons Library's account over the summer, there are now nine of them. Middlesbrough and Hartlepool came in 2023. Oxford Street, Old Trafford and Atom Valley came this January.
Then there's Birmingham East. That's an £11 billion programme taking in HS2 Curzon Street, the Knowledge Quarter and the Sports Quarter, with targets of 50,000 jobs and 20,000 homes. Liverpool's North Docks MDC is in the pipeline, and Greater Manchester has promised at least four more. The English Devolution and Community Empowerment Act, which we covered over the summer, now lets every mayor set one up, and the Rewiring the State Cabinet statement promised stronger development corporation powers alongside a review of arm's-length bodies.
But look at Cambridge. In July, Parliament approved the Greater Cambridge Development Corporation, with a target of 50,000 homes by 2040. It's a centrally led corporation under the New Towns Act, not a mayoral one. The mayor is one board member among council leaders and appointed experts. The seven new towns announced in March will get development corporations too, with the Olympic Legacy Corporation held up as the model.
The cautionary tale hasn't gone away either, with enduring controversies around Teesworks and sometimes ambivalence locally at the loss of direct local accountabilities. So are MDCs the delivery arm devolution has been missing, or a way of moving decisions further away from councils? David, where are you coming from on this?
A new toy in the toolbox?
David Marlow [02:32]
Yeah, I think it's a hard one. Isn't the temptation for every mayor that they've got to have one, or at least one, because it's the new toy in the toolbox? This resonates with so many episodes we've done. We could go back to our arm's-length body episodes, our investment zones episodes, our new town episodes. And isn't the reality that we are still facing a landscape where, rather than a delivery model of choice, any sub-regional or regional geography might well accommodate a new town development corporation, an investment zone, in due course one or more mayoral development corporations, and then quite a lot of other potential zones as well: an AI opportunity zone, a university enterprise zone, or whatever else individual mayors and government ministers come up with?
I suppose my point is going to be twofold, before I hand back to you. Number one, which has been a consistent theme in recent episodes, is delivery capacity. These things take very specific skills and capabilities, and all of these area-based initiatives, whether MDCs or not, are going to be fishing in the same pool of talent. That is surely going to be a concern about the variability of where talent ends up.
My second point, which you'd expect, is really the inclusive growth point: what ownership are local communities going to feel for their MDCs? If these are really, if you like, almost subnational English Partnerships-type approaches to property-led regeneration, then that doesn't bode well. So one of the things that I would say about MDCs, as I would say about investment zones and other area-based initiatives, is get your inclusive growth structures and processes built in from the start.
Why mayors want delivery vehicles
Mike Spicer [05:04]
I was just thinking back to our episode with Professor Pete Tyler from the University of Cambridge, where we go into some depth about area-based initiatives. For our listeners, if you haven't listened to it, it's a really great episode from the early days of LEDC, and a really substantive one. One of the comments that Pete made was around how zonal initiatives often prove to be quite an attractive proposition from a marketing perspective. Putting a zonal designation on a place can really help to market a place that's got potential already, perhaps already has some interest, but has some challenges as well that need to be overcome.
The reason I dwell on that is because I do think we've reached a point with mayors where they are looking for things that can show practical results on the ground. There is something about having a vehicle for delivering things that has proved popular - not just through the combined authority model, but before that with LEPs and enterprise zones and the various other initiatives that have come since. So I see the attraction of the MDC as a delivery vehicle. There are sometimes projects in your geography that are too complex to deliver through existing institutions. It can help sometimes to have those kinds of vehicles, as you say, David, for attracting talent around a specific challenge. And to be blunt about it, there are probably times when mayors are attracted to an approach that allows them to really bust through some of the long-standing challenges to the regeneration of a part of their patch.
So I can see the attraction. But I guess the question is, David, you listed all of those zonal initiatives, and of course in some places they will overlap, but in others they can't really overlap because of subsidy control and things like that. So are we getting to the point where we have to ask the question: where in the country isn't covered by a zonal initiative or some kind of delivery vehicle with a zonal perspective? I don't know. It feels like they're everywhere these days!
Overlapping zones and neighbourhood boards
David Marlow [07:39]
Yeah, it's a good point, and it's also interesting where, in a sense, you can't have them overlap. So, under either the Devolution and Community Empowerment Act or indeed the Pride in Place, Plan for Neighbourhoods, Town Deal type of programme, could you have a neighbourhood board with genuine powers and influence in an investment zone or an MDC area? I think that's actually going to be quite interesting, and it is real. Again, I was speaking with Hartlepool recently, who do have one of the Tees Valley devcos, but also have a town board designation under what is now the Pride in Place programme. So how those interface and don't, if you like, almost get dragged into conflict is quite a live issue.
Further listening and closing
Mike Spicer [08:37]
I'll just flag two other episodes that our listeners may be interested in, which either directly or indirectly touch on this. One is the episode we did with Michael Owens about the London 2012 Olympics and the book that he'd written describing how all of that came about. There are elements in that discussion where we talk about London in particular, with its 30-odd boroughs. There's a reason why these kinds of zonal initiatives have often focused on London: the problems that development corporations are there to solve are in abundance in London. You've got densely packed urban areas with boundaries that cut through them and all that sort of stuff, and you potentially need some kind of organising principle to bust through some of those challenges. London is a great petri dish for that sort of thing. So do listen to that episode.
The other one is the episode we did with John Houghton on urban regeneration. John has written quite extensively about the role of different types of organisation in the redevelopment of places, for example the establishment of Llandudno in North Wales and how that had an organising mind behind it. Not quite a development corporation as such, but some of the same principles that were applied in getting that town off the ground are there in the development corporation principle. So I think those two episodes are worth listening to if you've got the time. It's an endlessly fascinating topic, that of zonal initiatives and area-based initiatives, so do take the time to dive into it.
But I think we've probably run out of time, David. I hope you enjoyed our brief look at Mayoral Development Corporations, the principles that lie behind them, and similar initiatives. We'd like to hear from you. Is your mayor weighing up an MDC, and what problem would it solve that the combined authority or the council cannot? And when the corporation's job is done, who should get the powers back? Do share your suggestions for how we might get into these issues in greater depth, with guest or themed episode suggestions. And as ever, you can connect with us and all things LEDC through our website, www.ledconfidential.co.uk. Connect with our bonus material there, and send us your suggestions for future episodes. Until the next time.
