Quiet revolution in the way region is run starts today

MOST of us won’t notice, but from this morning Greater Manchester will be a different place.

Its old power structures will – with the retirement of Sir Howard Bernstein as chief executive of the Greater Manchester combined authority – have been quietly swept away.

From today, his place at the ‘super council’ top table – as the civil servant heading up Greater Manchester’s devolution project – will be filled by Eamonn Boylan, chief executive of Stockport council. At the same time Sir Howard’s twin role as Manchester council boss will be taken over by Wakefield’s Joanne Roney.

Just over a month later, the region’s first ever elected mayor will also be installed in Churchgate House, on Oxford Street.

In a way, this is day zero for Greater Manchester. What began as a loose grouping of council bosses discussing possible areas of collaboration – led in many respects by Sir Howard and Manchester’s council leader Sir Richard Leese – has grown into a devolution bandwagon, a cause celebre for cities across the country.

“It’s clearly a new adventure for us,” says Boylan, speaking just after the latest meeting of the combined authority, Sir Howard’s last, concludes at Bury town hall.

“The combined authority has been established for seven years now, but the advent of the office of the mayor means there’ll be a big change in political leadership and a big change in terms of the context we’re working in. So I’m looking forward to it.

“I’ve learned a great deal by working with Howard so I’m very daunted by the fact I’m taking over some of his responsibilities – because of course we’ve paid him the profound compliment of saying we’ll have to replace him with two full-time chief executives.”

Boylan – like Joanne Roney – has a lifelong career in housing regeneration under his belt. The pair worked on the same huge renovation project, Sheffield’s Park Hill estate, Roney having succeeded Boylan in 1999 as the city’s director of housing.

His ties to Manchester date back a long way, even if they began with a love for football.

“I’ve lived in Manchester since 1978 – I came here as a student. I used to tell the president of the university it was because the course was great, but it was because it was near United,” he smiles.

From life as an undergrad he moved out into grittier territory at a time when a housing boom was unimaginable – at the Miles Platting housing office on a one-week non-renewable contract.

The hardest part of his job – including the rebuild of Hulme, which he worked on from 1990 onwards – has not been the bricks and mortar but taking the people in those communities with him.

That conundrum has never been more relevant. Not everyone is convinced the combined authority’s housing strategy, headed up by Boylan for several years, has been the right one.

Does he feel the authority’s housing policy is currently in tune with public sentiment?

“I think it is, and I think what distorts it is that people don’t look at the combined authority’s housing policies or investment or strategies in the broader sense – they simply focus on one element, which is the housing investment fund,” he says.

“The fund has done a really good job in bringing forward development that would not otherwise have been built. There is a real demand for high density apartments in the city centre, often from relatively low-paid younger people, who find those properties their first foot on the housing ladder.”

Affordable housing will be key to the region’s spatial framework for growth over the next 20 years, he adds, referring to the blueprint that has caused such uproar over proposed green belt devel-