Spend any time at UKREIIF in Leeds and it’s clear where the energy in this country’s growth story now sits. Combined authority leaders, mayors, investors and developers are talking about Greater Manchester, Liverpool City Region, West Yorkshire and the wider North in terms that would have been unfamiliar even a decade ago. Devolution has shifted the conversation, and the next chapter is opening through Cheshire West. The question is whether engineering and construction is keeping pace.
The case for Manchester is compelling. CBRE estimates the city’s population could grow by close to 6% over the next decade, outpacing every other major UK city. Greater Manchester’s combined authority has set an ambitious housing trajectory, and its commercial pipeline, from city centre regeneration to new transport corridors, is one of the busiest outside London. Sutcliffe has been based in Manchester for 25 years, and Greater Manchester now accounts for the largest share of our work.
Liverpool City Region is telling a similarly striking story. What’s being put in place there is, to my mind, the most ambitious set of devolved delivery tools we’ve seen anywhere in the country. The Combined Authority has identified more than 300 sites with the potential to deliver 64,000 new homes. A £2 billion Investment Fund has been launched to unlock stalled schemes. A Mayoral Development Corporation is being set up to bring forward 17,500 homes and five million square feet of commercial space at the North Docks alone, alongside a £700 million social and affordable homes settlement that finally gives the region direct control over how housing is shaped and delivered. The North isn’t being asked to make the case for investment any more. It’s being asked whether it has the capacity to absorb it.
And that capacity question is, at its heart, an engineering question. Behind every regeneration scheme, every new neighbourhood and every transport upgrade sits a body of structural and civil engineering work that has to be specified, costed and delivered. Whilst the large national consultancies have their role, the case for regional engineering firms, the ones with offices in the cities they serve and engineers who live in the communities being built, is strong and it’s getting stronger.
We are a consultancy with deep roots in a region, we know how the ground conditions vary from one postcode to the next. We know the local planning culture, the politics of place and the supply chains that actually turn up on site. We’ve worked with the housing associations, the local authorities and the contractors over many cycles, which makes for faster decisions, fewer surprises and better outcomes. When a scheme runs into difficulty, and most schemes do, that institutional memory is the difference between a setback and a stall.
Sutcliffe has spent forty years building exactly that kind of capacity from a Liverpool base, and a quarter century doing the same from Manchester. We work across housing, education, healthcare, social housing and commercial development, and the people doing that work live, train and pay their taxes in the communities the projects serve.
If devolution is going to mean anything in practical terms, it has to support the local supply chains that turn investment into bricks, mortar and infrastructure. That means procurement that recognises the value of regional capacity. It means backing the colleges and universities that train the next generation of engineers in our regions. It means engaging with regional firms early in the development of frameworks.
The Northern growth story is real. Whether it becomes the Northern delivery story will depend on whether the country chooses to back the regional engineering capacity that will build