Manchester and Bruntwood
Chris Oglesby on levelling-up + Podcast + Other stories that matter + Harry Kane
Hello and welcome to the latest edition of Off to Lunch…
We have got to Friday without another big bank needing to be rescued this week (although share prices across the industry are down again) so I wanted to take this opportunity to write about Manchester…
I was in the city last week meeting business leaders on the day of the Budget. As I have already mentioned, the city was buzzing. It is cliched now to describe Manchester as buzzing, even a little patronising, as if those visiting the city from London and the south-east are surprised to discover that the north-west of England has culture and exciting cities too. Anyway, it was buzzing - both with people (the city centre was busier than London is during the week, which is reflected in data showing lower work-from-home rates) and construction work.
On the construction work, I got an opportunity to see Booking.com’s new offices at Manchester Goods Yard. This is an area of the city that is changing fast, with a new Soho House due to open nearby later this year, the first in the UK outside the south-east. Booking.com is one of a collection of multinational tech companies with a base in Manchester (Uber is another). The company’s offices in Manchester are regarded as its second headquarters after Amsterdam. From here it manages every part of Booking.com outside hotels, so things like car-hire. The office has the capacity for 1,200 staff - which the company needs. Booking.com hired another 450 staff for its Manchester office last year and has 200 vacancies at the moment as it looks to expand further.
Austin Sheppard, vice-president for engineering at Booking.com, relocated from Shanghai in 2021 to work in the Manchester offices. Sheppard, who is American, was previously chief technology officer at StubHub and spent nearly eight years at Amazon. “This is my favourite job,” he says of working for Booking.com in Manchester.
Another business leader I got the opportunity to sit down with was Chris Oglesby, the chief executive of Bruntwood. Oglesby’s name has come up constantly in conversations I have had about levelling up over the last year. Numerous politicians and business leaders have identified him as a key figure trying to boost the economy outside London.
Bruntwood is one of the biggest property developers outside London and specialises in regeneration projects across northern England. The Manchester-based business has led a series of big developments such as Circle Square in Manchester, the Alderley Park life-science campus in Cheshire, Enterprise Wharf in Birmingham and Platform in Leeds. Its science and tech-focused developments are part of a 50/50 joint venture with Legal & General called Bruntwood SciTech.
Bruntwood posted pre-tax profits of £75.2 million for 2022, up 68 per cent year-on-year, and its property portfolio is worth £2 billion. Not only that, but the businesses based in its properties include the exciting start-ups that are driving Manchester’s reputation as a leading European tech hub.
Bruntwood was founded by Oglesby’s father, Michael Oglesby, in 1976 and the business is still family-owned. Every year it gives 10 per cent of its profits to good causes. Oglesby says the priority for Bruntwood is “boosting the economy of the cities we are investing in”, which gives you a sense of how this company operates.
However, Oglesby has concerns about levelling up. He has spoken publicly about the need to improve transport infrastructure in the north-west, writing to the government last year to warn that disruption to Avanti train services was a “dire situation” that was dragging down the economy.
The Bruntwood boss says that one of the challenges in getting the government to invest in transport infrastructure in the north-west is the way the Treasury calculates the potential returns on spending. This means the true benefits of improving infrastructure can be obscured. “People will use it if there is investment. But the green-book always say: ‘Don’t put money into it, you won’t get the return’,” he says. “So much capacity is unrealised. It seems like nobody is brave enough to recognise what we need.”
Oglesby is a supporter of HS2, describing it as “hugely important”, both for reducing how long it takes to get between Manchester and London and expanding capacity on the rail network. “Being that close to London is a competitive advantage [for Manchester]. But it isn’t,” he says. “We should just bloody deliver it. It’s crazy.”
Another concern that Oglesby has with levelling-up is the phrase itself. “It’s a political brand and I prefer a more positive brand,” he says. “I think it is actually quite patronising.” In contrast, Oglesby says organisations in Manchester, including Bruntwood, were able to use the Northern Powerhouse brand promoted by George Osborne to attract international investment.
That point demonstrates how Oglesby is optimistic about the future for Manchester. He says he is “hugely excited” for the city and speaks about a “virtuous circle” of investment and jobs.
One of the projects that Bruntwood is working on is a regeneration of Bury town centre, which is just north of Manchester. It has bought the Mill Gate shopping centre in Bury in partnership with the council. According to Oglesby, investing in Bury and other town centres can have two significant benefits for the UK - it can boost the economy but also tackle the national housing shortage, with empty shops repurposed into residential property or leisure hubs. “We can make these town centres liveable places again,” he explains. “We need more people living in town centres. The reality is we could hit housing needs by repopulating towns around the cities. It could solve a lot of the housing shortage.”
That is a suitably optimistic note to finish on - that there is an opportunity to level-up the UK economy and tackle the housing shortage at the same time.
Podcast…
The latest episode of our Business Studies podcast went live on Tuesday. It features an interview with James Bailey, the boss of Waitrose. Bailey speaks about trying to turnaround falling sales for the upmarket supermarket chain, running an employee-led business, the future of food and his own career, including how he nearly got fired at Sainsbury’s for calling for flexible working. You can listen to the episode on Substack here as well as Apple here and Spotify here. There is bonus content on this episode coming next week…
Other stories that matter…
I have written a lot about the need to improve transport connections between the cities in northern England. However, links between Cardiff, Bristol and other key economic hubs in the south-west of England and Wales are also poor. Local leaders have put together an £8 billion proposal to improve infrastructure and rail services by 2050 (BBC)
Andrew Bailey, the governor of the Bank of England, has revealed that UK customers of Silicon Valley Bank withdrew £2.9 billion in a single day as concerns spread about the health of the institution (The Times) And one of the PR executives who worked for SVB UK has offered 15 tips on how to manage a crisis (LinkedIn)
Blackpool Pleasure Beach has posted a sharp rise in annual revenue and returned to profit last year. However, the theme park has warned of a difficult 12 months ahead (Business Live)
The Sunday Times has published its annual guide to the best places to live in the UK. Liverpool, Leamington Spa, Whitley Bay, Dunkeld and Ruthin all feature (The Times)
Do Kwon, the cryptocurrency fugitive who has been on the run since last summer, has been arrested in Montenegro and charged with fraud by the US. Do Kwon was behind TerraUSD, which collapsed last year, leaving investors with heavy losses (The Guardian)
A fascinating piece on how getting access to more and more data doesn’t increase the quality of forecasts but does increase the confidence of those making them. This is an important observation given the weight attached to economic forecasts (Klement on Investing)
Podcast host David Senra had dinner with Charlie Munger, Warren Buffett’s business partner, and has produced an episode on what he learned (Founders)
The Danish mortgage system - why aren’t more countries trying to do this? (Marginal Revolution)
Bill Gates has written a long piece on why recent developments in AI technology such as ChatGPT are the “most important advance in technology since the graphical user interface” (GatesNotes)
Apple is interested in buying the rights to stream Premier League matches (Bloomberg)
And finally…
Lots of Off to Lunch subscribers have been in touch to say how much they enjoyed The Rest is Politics podcast episodes on Iraq, which I flagged on Monday. As a follow-up to that, check out The Rest is History’s three-part series on the life and presidency of Ronald Reagan…
For fans of Succession, this is a big weekend. The fourth and final season of the show starts on Sunday night in the US and will be available to watch in the UK from Monday morning on-demand on Sky. The trailer for the final season is below…
Lastly, this is a pretty cool video of Harry Kane going back to the England dressing room on Thursday night after becoming the country’s leading scorer in male international football…
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Best
Graham