Tackling Inequalities: The Salford Way

Local economies are posed with challenges of an unprecedented scale. The Covid-19 pandemic has both exacerbated deeply entrenched inequalities and exposed the need for genuine economic and societal change.

When I was first elected Salford Mayor in 2016, I set out a policy platform to create a fairer and better Salford through a huge programme of local authority-led investment, insourcing and new municipalism, which I have come to term ‘Sensible Socialism’ – or The Salford Way.

As a city council we have invested millions of pounds into our local economy, green spaces, infrastructure, social housing and cultural and heritage assets over the past decade. The best known of which laid the foundations for MediaCityUK, now home to the country’s second-largest hub for digital, media and creative enterprises outside London.

As Salford looks to the future and recovery, inclusivity and tackling entrenched structural inequalities must be at the heart of everything we do as we seek to build a fairer, greener and healthier Salford for all.

This is why I was proud to announce earlier this year the next phase of our economic and social transformation. The Salford Way marks a turning point in our approach to sustainable economic development in the city and sets out a bold five-point plan to:

• Build greater local community wealth - stepping up our efforts to re-direct public procurement spend back into the local economy and drive forward improvements in social value standards, making sure that public contracts are only awarded to businesses who can display progress on developing local supply chains, good terms and conditions for staff, and a small carbon footprint

• Grow the social economy - promoting greater diversity of business ownership, from co-operatives and mutuals to employee ownership, we want to create a rich ecosystem of alternative economic models to support residents to benefit from local wealth generation.

• Accelerate transition to a zero-carbon economy by delivering the new green jobs and industries of the future and investing in clean, renewable energy and transport improvements. Building on the great work already happening which has seen Salford recognised as the North West’s greenest council by Friends of the Earth.?

• Identify opportunities for further insourcing, which has already begun to happen locally when Urban Vision (responsible for road maintenance, highways, and building control) was recently brought back into local authority control. And I’m pleased to announce we will be working directly with APSE on how we can put this into practice.

• Strengthen our local democracy, focused on opening opportunities for greater citizen participation in our economy, in our public spaces, and in our institutions such as through our new Crowdfunding initiative working with CrowdfunderUK.

It’s a bold and ambitious blueprint that seeks not just recovery from the pandemic, but a radical overhaul of the injustices present in our society led by an interventionist, empowered local council and equal, fair and thriving local communities

Salford has a proud history of resilience and pioneering progressive change. And this work harnesses the city’s roots in the co-operative movement, which has already seen Salford become the Northwest’s first Social Enterprise City and more recently, the first city in England to commit to becoming a Real Living Wage City.

It’s now time to look to the future and the Salford Way is our plan for how we can create community wealth from within and retain it in the city, tackle poverty and economic disparity, improve population health and support each other to create a more prosperous Salford for all.

To find out more about the Salford Way visit: https://www.salford.gov.uk/your-council/the-salford-way/

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