If Manchesterism is going national, universities need to hold on to public engagement

Andy Burnham wants other regions to learn from Greater Manchester.

On 31 July, less than a week into his role as PM, he set out his vision for England: Rewiring the State, an expansion of devolution following the success of Greater Manchester.

It’s easy to see why. Over the past decade, the city-region has emerged as one of the UK’s most effective examples of place-based reform. Economic growth has been accompanied by greater integration of public services, effective university partnerships and a strong sense of civic purpose. In policy circles, this combination of devolution, partnership and long-term thinking has become known as “Manchesterism”.

Now there are growing calls to replicate that prosperity elsewhere.

But there is a danger in how the model is being interpreted. Much of the discussion focuses on governance, investment, business partnerships and economic growth. Important as these are, they overlook an essential ingredient for Manchester’s success: relationships with communities.

Growth and people

The Greater Manchester Strategy 2025–35 is explicit about this.

It rests on two strands, a growth plan and a people plan, and states that “growth in Greater Manchester is not an end in itself – it’s a way of improving lives”. Public services are to be “led by communities and supported by enabling systems”, with people “not seen as problems but as partners”. This is inclusive growth, and it depends on relationships as much as investment.

The lesson from Greater Manchester is not simply that institutions need to work together. It is that they need to work with people. Universities are positioned as anchor institutions in this model, capable of driving local growth, innovation, and social value. But this prosperity cannot be replicated without the infrastructure to support its people side too: the relationships, partnerships, shared spaces and trust that allow communities to come together with researchers to meet today’s complex societal challenges.

Take mental health inequalities. For more than two decades, Dawn Edge at the University of Manchester has researched the disproportionately poor mental health outcomes experienced by Black, Asian and other minoritised communities. The evidence documenting those inequalities is not new. People of African and Caribbean heritage, including Black British and mixed heritage communities, are significantly more likely to receive a diagnosis of schizophrenia, while being less likely to access psychological therapies.

Dawn Edge identified a familiar problem. Despite decades of evidence, there was little action that had been shaped by the communities most affected.

Rather than seeing communities as subjects of research, she worked with local charities, NHS partners, policymakers, and community organisations to create spaces where residents could identify priorities and shape solutions. The result has been the development of a culturally informed digital mental health intervention now being evaluated. Whether the intervention succeeds or fails will depend on the evidence. But it exists because engagement was treated as part of the research process, not something that happened after the fact.

Engagement as infrastructure

Public engagement is often presented as a communications function or an optional add-on to research and teaching.

In reality, it is a mechanism through which universities can ensure their work is legitimate, responsive and rooted in local priorities. It changes how knowledge is produced, how decisions are made, and whose voices get heard. Crucially, quality public engagement also builds trust – trust in research and the value of universities, something that is increasingly threatened by misinformation and rising social divisions. Recent research from the Campaign for Science and Engineering (CaSE) found that just 18 per cent of UK adults could immediately think of lots of ways that research and development benefits them and their family, or their local area.

Trust, and deep relationships with people and communities are not built overnight – they take time, transparency, and commitment. Fortunately for Manchester, the universities have a strong history of working with communities. In 2008, the University of Manchester, Manchester Metropolitan University, and the University of Salford, with the Museum of Science and Industry and the North West Regional Development Agency, formed the Manchester Beacon for Public Engagement.

This was one of six national beacons set up alongside the National Co-ordinating Centre for Public Engagement. Its strapline was “connecting people, place and knowledge”, and it set out to “reach out, listen to, learn from and collaborate with” local people, particularly in excluded neighbourhoods. When the programme finished, evaluators of the Manchester Beacon for Public Engagement recommended that this learning be fed into future plans for Greater Manchester. That recommendation is reflected in the Greater Manchester model and is central to devolution’s success here.

Sadly, the infrastructure behind effective public engagement is proving fragile elsewhere.

The drift

The economic pressures facing higher education are forcing difficult decisions across the nation.

Our first national snapshot on public engagement and engaged research in UK higher education, Public and Community Engagement: The State of the Sector has revealed a worrying trend, which we call the drift. Engagement roles and budgets are often among the first to be cut, and short-term project funding makes long-term relationships hard to sustain. The conditions that make engagement durable are being quietly eroded, not through intention, but through the weight of accumulated constraint.

At precisely the moment public trust matters most, the infrastructure that builds it is under pressure. Place-based growth requires the capacity to listen to those places, and forms of collaboration that recognise citizens as partners rather than recipients.

There is a real opportunity here. UKRI’s new mission is to “advance knowledge, improve lives and drive growth”, and its strategy commits to people and communities playing “a meaningful role in shaping research”. UKRI’s newly created £500m Local Innovation Partnerships Fund has opened to various regions across the UK with the ambition of empowering “innovation leadership through local ‘triple helix’ partnerships between civic institutions, business and universities, delivering impact, at scale”. REF 2029 now explicitly welcomes engagement in impact case studies and asks institutions to show that their strategies are visible in where they invest. The levers for connecting growth to improving lives are in place. What they depend on is the capacity, on the ground, to make that connection.

Hold on to engagement

So, our call to the sector is this: hold on to engagement.

Without it, it is easy to overclaim and oversimplify how universities create value or simply count spin-outs and investment and assume there will be benefits that fit the people. Public engagement is the essential point of connection between universities and the people and places they serve. Only with it, can universities become the anchor institutions of Burnham’s Manchester model.

That is why our recommendations, published alongside the State of the Sector report, start with treating engagement as essential infrastructure: load-bearing, not discretionary. For funders, that means long-term, place-based partnerships rather than two- or three-year projects. For university leaders, it means making engagement visible in budgets and strategy, not just mission statements. For government, local authorities and mayors, it means treating universities and communities as partners in inclusive, place-based growth.

Manchester’s success offers an important lesson. Thriving places are not built through investment alone. They are built through relationships. Without that, “Manchesterism” may prove difficult to export. With it, universities can play a central role in creating places that are not only more prosperous, but more democratic, inclusive, and trusted.