Written Evidence Submitted by Greater Manchester Combined Authority (GMCA)
(CRV0050)
In the context of the Government’s “Research and Development Roadmap”, what shorter-term measures can best support the UK research and innovation in recovering from the disruption of the COVID-19 pandemic and adapting to the post-COVID environment?
Research and Development Roadmap
We welcome Government’s UK Research and Development (R&D) Roadmap and its aim to “support increased collaboration between Local, regional and devolved institutions… and ensure a strong role for local civic and businesses leaders in defining and delivering on local opportunities”.
The roadmap not only lays out the way in which Government, local authorities, combined authorities and businesses can embed innovation and research into places, it also forms a significant opportunity to place science, innovation, infrastructure, and skills at the heart of its ambitions to transform the UK’s global position and to level up national economic performance.
It is in-sync with the wider goals of the new Plan for Growth, where infrastructure, innovation, and skills are key pillars.
However, there needs to be deeper national-local partnerships for these aims to be executed effectively and in order to unlock an innovation-led economic recovery, and we must learn from Local Industrial Strategies about what does and does not work. We expect that the forthcoming R&D Place Plan, and the Innovation Strategy referenced in the Plan for Growth, will need to consider how to build effective innovation ecosystems through closer national-local collaboration. Key to this will be demonstrating how R&D and innovation can unlock economic prosperity for our towns and cities alike.
Greater Manchester unveiled its Future Economic Vision in November 2020. It sets out our mission to unlock an economic recovery that puts people first, and channel our science and innovation assets and ecosystem to address our most pressing challenges of good employment, net zero, and reducing inequalities. Our Innovation GM platform is built around Greater Manchester’s world leading strengths in advanced materials, health innovation, digital and creative, and clean growth. Central to the Innovation GM vision is to harness these to ensure they bring prosperity to people and places in the city-region and wider North.
We see significant opportunities to boost the resilience of the UK economy by unlocking the manufacturing potential of our towns, and by boosting the business start-up and scale-up offer in both towns and cities.
Innovation Greater Manchester
Innovation GM is a new business led partnership whose role will be to align GM priorities on innovation with the work of Government and national agencies. The partnership connects places across our diverse city-region that have not traditionally benefited from investment in R&D, through a new network of innovation zones across our urban core, towns, and well-connected industry parks.
We believe the R&D Place Plan, and the forthcoming Innovation Strategy as announced in the Plan for Growth, creates an opportunity for an innovation deal with places like Greater Manchester to align local and national priorities around people, places, and assets, and to ensure city-regions can play an active role in Global Britain and Levelling Up.
Greater Manchester is building on strong foundations through its significant science assets and research excellence based out of high impact urban innovation districts, a diverse and fast growing talent pipeline, our mature global partnerships with city-regions across the globe, and a clear plan for the future to translate these strengths in to prosperity for our towns.
We have aligned civic, business, and scientific leadership for our Innovation GM partnership, underpinned by sophisticated pipeline of investment propositions across our cities and towns.
As such we believe Greater Manchester is a place with significant potential for Government to work in ever closer partnership with.
Greater Manchester and Cheshire East’s science excellence and key related assets Sourced from the Greater Manchester and Cheshire East Science & Innovation Audit | |
Strengths | |
Health Innovation GM has amongst the highest concentrations of allied health research in the UK University of Manchester is 5th in the UK for research power in medical sciences, the highest-ranking institution outside the South East Key assets include: the Medicines Discovery Catapult, Manchester Cancer Research Centre, the Manchester Institute for Biotechnology, The Stoller Biomarker Discovery Centre, Manchester Science Park, Citylabs, the Christabel Pankhurst Institute for Health Technology Research and Innovation, the UK Biobank, and Alderley Science Park | Advanced materials University of Manchester produces the second-highest number of publications in 10% most cited among Russell Group universities GM leads the world in graphene citations and is amongst the world leaders in carbon capture and storage Key assets include: BP Centre for Advanced Materials, Sir Henry Royce Institute, National Graphene Institute, Graphene Engineering Innovation Centre, the International Centre for Advanced Materials, and the Cockcroft Institute
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Fast-growing opportunities | |
Clean Growth
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However our view is that business as usual will not achieve the transformational change for our people and places that we have shared national and local aims for. We need to reduce fragmentation across R&D, skills, and infrastructure, to drive more diffusion and to do this in a way that learns from peer places across the world.
Greater Manchester is home to existing high impact innovation zones, particularly Manchester Oxford Road Corridor and MediaCity UK (Salford), that can be built out from.
Covering one square mile, the Oxford Road Corridor is at the heart of the City of Manchester, closely connected to Piccadilly and Oxford Road rail stations, and accounts for 50% of GM’s key science and innovation assets.
It is home to anchor institutions including two universities and Manchester Foundation Trust, who are key players in the unique senior level partnership that cuts across academia, business, local government, NHS and cultural institutions.
The Corridor has particular specialisms in advanced materials and health innovation, as well as digital and smart energy solutions, and is home to 50% of Manchester’s life sciences businesses, 20,000 clinical research participants, and more widely 74,000 students (42% of which relate to STEM), including over 16,000 international students.
As a result of £1.1bn investment the Corridor has unlocked over 79,000 jobs and £3.6bn annual GVA, and sees 27,000 graduate and post-graduate supplied in to the labour market every year.
Innovation District Manchester is a once-in-a-generation 18 acre city-centre development site with the potential to create up to 10,000 jobs in R&D intensive sectors linked to the science excellence on the Oxford Road Corridor. Situated immediately adjacent to Manchester Piccadilly rail station and the University of Manchester’s main campus, it will super-charge the Oxford Road Corridor’s impact and scale and create a new commercially led innovation neighbourhood with a mix of spaces for spin out and start-ups, SMEs, and multinational firms to innovate, collaborate and grow.
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These existing innovation zones and their surrounding areas have significant investment planned for the future, particularly through Innovation District Manchester and Salford Innovation Triangle.
Case study: Salford Innovation Triangle
A rapidly developing urban innovation zone at scale comprising three distinct innovation districts; Salford Crescent, MediaCityUK and Salford Royal providing opportunities to further build on frontier sector strengths in digital and health innovation.
• Salford Crescent – a £2.5 billion (240 acre) regeneration scheme set to deliver 3,000 new homes, 7,000 new jobs, and over 1m sq ft of commercial and innovation space that will include areas for health, automation, and robotics • MediaCityUK – approved plans to double in size and the wider Quays areas over the next 10 years and future development opportunity areas at Liverpool Street and the area immediately north of MediaCityUK. • Salford Royal – largest employer in Salford already providing 7,000 jobs – a significant health and social care innovation pioneer committed to future health innovation and better health outcomes for our communities
The Triangle has the potential to bring forward up to 25,000 new high skilled innovation jobs including 6,500 jobs at The Crescent Innovation District and 15,000 jobs at MediaCityUK & The Quays, providing up to £1.5 billion of GVA per annum (based on current estimates).
Key linkages with the wider Greater Manchester ecosystem provide potential to develop a new industrial economy based around Port Salford including manufacturing and logistics innovation.
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Innovation GM identifies the opportunity to level up through science and innovation by networking these high performing city centre innovation zones with emerging innovation clusters across the city-region and wider North, unlocking new good quality jobs in town centre sites and manufacturing parks.
Our Gateway North site is an example of where we are developing a new Manufacturing Innovation Park, working with Catapults, public research institutes, and industry.
Case study: Gateway North Manufacturing Innovation Park
Gateway North is the largest strategic site in Greater Manchester and a core component of the growth plans for the city-region in the next 20 years.
The site has excellent connectivity to the national motorway network, sitting at the intersection of the M60 Manchester orbital motorway, the M66 to Lancashire in the North and the M62 which connects with the major cities of Liverpool and Leeds, and beyond. As such, it has the scale, connectivity and profile required to attract a broad range of occupiers and inward investors.
Gateway North Manufacturing Innovation Park
This site will host the North West’s newest and largest Manufacturing Innovation Park with a cluster of new research and interconnected training facilities focusing on advanced materials and manufacturing, and modern construction methods, linked to the strengths of the universities in the city region.
Investment in the Manufacturing Innovation Park is capable of transforming the economic performance of Bury, Rochdale, Lancashire and Yorkshire.
The site will also attract inward investment of new high performing and innovation-intensive companies to the North, leading to the creation of high quality skilled jobs. The site is one of only a handful in Greater Manchester with the capacity to accommodate large scale advanced manufacturing operations and their related supply chain requirements. There is a pipeline of major manufacturing companies ready to locate at the site to anchor new industries around this high impact innovation park.
Gateway North is one of three strategic sites identified in local plans along the M62 motorway which together comprise the M62 North East Corridor, Stakehill Industrial Estate, and Kingsway Business Park, and through new transport links the Kingsway site is planned to host a new Advanced Machinery & Productivity Institute (AMPI), an industry led initiative, involving the National Physical Laboratory, to stimulate growth in manufacturing machinery and associated technology sectors.
The site will be anchored around Greater Manchester’s excellence and industrial application of advanced materials, modern methods of construction, and advanced manufacturing (specifically coatings. textiles, IoT, polymers, with a growing opportunity for additive manufacturing).
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By taking a strategic view and building local capacity, Innovation GM will leverage the prime knowledge and commercial assets for far wider benefit. It will ensure that public money lands effectively in those places where it has proved most challenging in the past. If we level up across our city region we will in turn drive better outcomes in our prime knowledge and commercial assets - being additive rather than displacing existing activity.
A big focus for Innovation GM is diffusion of knowledge and technologies in to the wider business base to drive technological diversity and create good jobs in our towns as well as our cities – the Manufacturing Made Smarter programme developed and delivered by the Greater Manchester Growth Company is an example of how places can work in partnership with Government to do this.
Case study: Made Smarter
The Made Smarter programme is supporting North West manufacturers to utilise and embed digital manufacturing technologies to address firm-level operational challenges.
It builds on Greater Manchester and the wider region’s significant manufacturing business base and emerging strengths in digital manufacturing.
The programme supports SMEs to develop technology roadmaps through access to technology experts, adoption grants, leadership training, technology transfer interns, and workforce development.
Manufacturing Made Smarter has supported manufacturing SMEs to adopt a range of technologies (automated industrial machinery, additive manufacturing, industrial IT infrastructure).
As a programme targeted at the North West region, it was able to draw on the existing strong manufacturing networks and business clusters to engage such a wide range of businesses to diffuse technologies at pace and scale, and boost exporting.
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How Innovation GM can help achieve the aims of the R&D Roadmap
Innovation GM is our plan to answer two questions – how do we get maximum return-on-investment for spending on R&D, and how do we ensure it translates into real productivity gains, good jobs and a competitive business base across the regions and places of the UK. It will help drive Global Britain by exploiting assets that sit in GM for the benefit of UK global growth, driving towards Net Zero and supporting the levelling up.
We have a clear plan to move on the opportunities R&D and innovation offer for levelling up and prosperity in our cities and towns.
This approach could provide the foundation for the UK’s first Innovation deal, a formal collaboration agreement with Government to align local business needs and strategic priorities with national R&D and innovation activity to maximise synergies, reduce fragmentation, and simplify the innovation support systems for business.
In line with the approach of previous policies such as Enterprise Zones (of which two are located in the city-region - Manchester Airport and one around the Manchester Life Sciences Enterprise Zone on the Oxford Road Corridor), local funding flexibilities from Government would enable Greater Manchester to act as much greater pace and scale, reducing fragmentation across funding siloes. Enterprise Zones (EZ’s) have benefited from business rates discounts for eligible businesses, simplified planning approaches, improved infrastructure, and have created investment in local areas. The current review of R&D Tax Credits provides an opportunity to think creatively about how incentives for innovation can be unlocked in a more place-based way, driving investment and growth across an ecosystem of innovation zones.
We have put in place foundations for Innovation GM to provide the leadership, coordination and delivery capacity needed to create an innovation ecosystem in GM to match those seen in the world’s most successful and prosperous city-regions. It would align local and national priorities around people, places and assets, underpinned by civic, business, and scientific leadership.
The interim Chair, Chris Oglesby and our independent innovation advisor, Professor Richard Jones, are working with a small executive team to translate our vision in to action. The strategy is supported by a pipeline of projects developed with partners across and around the Greater Manchester city-region.
Local business and civic leaders would welcome the opportunity to discuss Innovation GM with the Committee as it begins further oral evidence sessions on the R&D Place Plan and forthcoming Innovation Strategy.
(March 2021)