‘If we get culture, skills and transport right our city will flourish’

As leader of the council responsible for the UK’s youngest population, Susan Hinchcliffe says 2020 is shaping up to be a big year for Bradford’s efforts to punch its weight alongside Leeds and Manchester.

“I FIND myself fashionable all of a sudden, which I’ve never been in the past,” says Susan Hinchcliffe, musing on the Government’s new-found interest in the North of England.

It’s a feeling the leader of Bradford council may have to get used to following the Conservatives’ General Election victory, which included wins a host of former Labour strongholds around Yorkshire.

Since then, the talk of Westminster is of how Boris Johnson will keep Tory MPs and their constituents in socalled ‘red wall’ seats happy by turning on the spending taps and potentially moving London institutions to the North.

“So, the North is fashionable, and that is great,” says Coun Hinchcliffe. “But of course, we all need to know that it means something in practice and that the investment is following that.”

Crucial to this task, she says, is that “people are now listening to what northern people have to say, they’re starting to understand the North has felt that it’s been a bit of a two-track country”.

“We have just as much potential here as the greater South-East has, but we’ve not had the investment to make that growth accelerate, and that’s what we need to see now.”

The council leader, who also chairs the West Yorkshire Combined Authority responsible for promoting economic growth in the county, is well-placed to form a view of the contrasts between her native city and the capital.

Born and bred in Bradford, she was working in the community on regeneration projects in north London around the turn of the century when she joined the Labour Party and became secretary of her local branch.

After selling the business she ran with her mother in 1995 she ended up in London, initially working for an internet marketing agency and joining the marketing and subscriptions team for a national newspaper. And in the years before she went into politics full-time after being elected as council leader, she worked for one of the Prince of Wales’ charities, Business in the Community, promoting responsible enterprise.

Moving back to the city from London to be near her parents, Coun Hinchcliffe’s family have been in Bradford for generations.

“I’m the person in my family who’s had the most benefit from Bradford,” she says. “Previous generations didn’t have it as good.

“Therefore I just think I have an opportunity and obligation to make sure Bradford’s fit for the future and takes its rightful place in the North of England as a big metropolitan city with a young population, lots of global links.

“It feels like a real opportunity for us as a place that we’ve not yet grabbed and I think we’re on the cusp of something, we really could achieve that this time.”

Getting better connected is key to the success of a city that former Transport Secretary Chris Grayling described as being “woefully badly-served by transport”. For months, lobbying effort have been going on to ensure the planned Northern Powerhouse Rail project has a stop in Bradford city centre.

With route plans being drawn up for the £39bn route connecting Leeds, Manchester and other northern cities, Coun Hinchcliffe says 2020 will be a “big year” in determining whether this has been a success.

She is also part of efforts to ensure West Yorkshire gets a long-awaited mass transit system, but as a leader of the youngest city in the UK she says she wants the issue of skills to get equal billing.

Chairing the Future-Ready Skills Commission, she leads a team of experts exploring how greater devolution can create a skills system that responds to the need of local economies.

Getting a West Yorkshire devolution deal would bring in £64m a year in extra resources to spend on adult education, but she says a wider problem is the centralised way the Department for Education works and the lack of schemes being tailored to train the local workforce.

“Actually it’s not right that we live in a country where if you don’t have all the qualifications and skills requirements you need by the age of 25, you can’t do anything about it after that without paying your own money.

“So what are we going to do about people who need those skills to get the jobs they need and employers need to actually fuel their businesses as well?

“There’s a real gap I think in this country between the skills requirements and the skills that people have and we need to bridge that gap.”

Bradford has its wellpublicised problems, including some of the highest levels of child poverty in the country.

But Coun Hinchcliffe says: “I’m clear that in Bradford if you get transport, skills and culture right, then this city can fly.”

Does Bradford suffer from its perception outside the city boundaries of not matching the reality?

Possibly, she says, before adding: “I think we haven’t got to have a chip on our shoulder about it. We have a working social history in Bradford that we should be proud of and therefore we should be more confident as a place.

“And that’s not about saying ‘oh, we’re different to how we’re portrayed’, it is about saying ‘this is who we are, we’ve got a lot to offer, we’ve got this young population, we’ve got global links, let us be part of the story of success of this country’, and we need to be out and proud telling that story.”