2025 SALFORD – A MODERN GLOBAL CITY

Executive Summary

One City – One Ambition

In the past five years, the city has maximised its location, assets and capacity to deliver tangible benefits for the growing population of both Salford and the region. Billions of pounds have been invested in new infrastructure and public realm, new homes, education and health facilities, new businesses and shops - from major developments to city parks, revitalised waterways and green spaces. Utmost has been the absolute priority to connect the city and its residents to the growing opportunities in and around Salford, to secure jobs and growth, and to target secured investment and regeneration focus towards those areas in greatest need. As a result, more people than ever before are choosing Salford as a place to live, work, invest and visit.

But times are changing, resources have become more limited and a new and refreshed approach is now required. One that builds on and brings together the Central Salford Vision and Regeneration Framework and the Salford West Strategic Regeneration Framework and Action Plan to provide a clear and ambitious new city-wide vision and commitment to delivery for Salford over the next 12 years.

2025 Salford – A ModernGlobalCity sets out that ambitious vision – founded on a commitment to contribute significantly to the Greater Manchester growth agenda. It sets the framework that underpins Salford’s continuing transformational agenda, creating decent accessible jobs, outstanding environments where our communities can grow, and sustained economic growth by delivering game changing programmes and projects that will make a real difference to the communities around them.

Growing our City

Testimony to becoming a modern global city - Salford is set to grow significantly. Population growth is expected to be higher than the Greater Manchester, North West and national averages up to 2025. There are similarly strong forecasts for economic growth – with the number of forecast jobs outstripping the forecasts for Greater Manchester, the region and UK as a whole.

Significant and continued economic growth will create new challenges for Salford. But it also creates a momentous opportunity to continue our transformational agenda.

2025 Salford provides a roadmap of opportunity to create a modern global city of the future. By 2025 our ambition is to have:

  • Transformed the skyline of the city through outstanding and iconic new infrastructure.Working with our private sector partners, we aim to set a new benchmark for civic realm, places, spaces and buildings across the whole city, building on the successes of MediaCityUK, Salford City Stadium, Greengate and Salford Central.
  • Stimulated further growth by strengthening and diversifying our economic base. The delivery of world class developments across the city presents huge opportunities for growth. This is particularly critical to the revitalisation of key corridors along the A57 in Irlam & Cadishead which will unlock the full development potential of the Barton Strategic Corridor.
  • Shaped places and delivered outstanding environmental quality. This will encourage our growing and increasingly diversified population to remain, support future families and promote the city to others as a place to live and invest.Investment in housing, health facilities and schools, utilising more of the vast green space that characterises the west of the city and enhancing even further the heritage, culture and environmental quality synonymous with great European cities will drive our ambition.
  • Connected people to opportunity.We will have made significant progress in providing Salford’s citizens with a transport network that meets their needs in terms of connectivity, choice, safety, affordability and reliability. Promoting educational excellence and up-skilling, incorporating employment standard charters into the development aspiration to connect people to real jobs, and stimulating ambition and drive amongst communities will have become the backbone of our enabling role.

2025 Salford willachieve this ambition by securing connectivity between strategic programmes, projects and people-focused interventions across four themes: Transforming Places; Stimulating and Sustaining Growth; Connecting People to Opportunity; and Delivering Strategic Connectivity.Delivering this city-wide framework will enable Salford to be the most dynamic and modern global city in the region by 2025.

Building blocks to success

Greater Manchester’s strategic ambitions are closely connected with Salford’s future. The Greater Manchester Strategy sets out a clear and ambitious growth agenda for the City Region. This will ensure that together we create the conditions for growth by repositioning Greater Manchester within changing global markets as a place in which to invest, do business, live and visit – by addressing market failure; driving and diversifying business growth; and creating safe, sustainable and healthy places.

Salford will work with Manchester to grow a shared Regional Centre and further strengthen Greater Manchester’s position as the area outside of London most likely to be able to increase its long-term growth rate, to access international networks and enjoy strong connections to the rest of the world[1].

This ambitious agenda can only be delivered through collaboration and partnership with others – including Government and the private sector. Salford’s new City Plan will establish new and more effective methods of engagement to deliver change. The city already has a strong track record of partnership working both across the city and through the leadership provided by the statutory Combined Authority.

This is a challenging agenda. New building blocks will now drive our approach to regeneration delivery and investment across the city:

  • Enhancing our collaborative approach with GM partners to maximise the leverage of resources into Salford and the City Region.Economic growth and employment opportunity will be key factors in determining priorities for investment across the city.
  • Government support and public sector investment remain critical.Government MUST continue to invest in infrastructure and regeneration. Our commitment will be to target the increasingly limited amount of public sector investment carefully as we move forward, promoting projects that maximise a return on investment and make a real difference to quality of life in the city.
  • Salford will re-focus to deliver a market facing investment strategy– maximising any opportunity to collaborate with private sector partners. It will be opportunities most attractive to the market that our attentions will be focussed upon.

Delivery by Collaboration

The Greater Manchester Investment Framework underpins delivery of our vision, ensuring that we are able to make effective use of investment resources. This is increasingly important – public funding to support growth continues to be limited. Whilst a commitment to continued public sector investment by Government is critical to our success, it is increasingly important that we make smart decisions about how best to invest available funds to support our growth agenda.

This refreshed approach will ensure Greater Manchester – and Salford – are well placed to realise our ambitions. Three year regeneration and investment action plans setting out clear and ambitious targets will be used to monitor our future success.Communities will be invited to comment on their progress regularly. A new ‘Building Growth’ forum will be establishedby the City Mayor to drive the city-wide ambition as a critical partner.

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[1] Greater Manchester Strategy 2013-2020 (consultation draft), Greater Manchester Combined Authority (March 2013)