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The remaking of post-industrial Manchester ranks among the many most exceptional English financial tales of latest a long time. Sir Howard Bernstein was its chief creator.
As chief government of Manchester council, Bernstein, who died on Saturday aged 71 after a brief sickness, spearheaded a era of imaginative civic management, offering a template for different cities and cities looking for to shake off the blight of Seventies and Nineteen Eighties decline.
Bernstein’s attain and fame prolonged properly past that of a standard city corridor official and he was described by former chancellor George Osborne as “the star of British native authorities”. A consummate fixer and dealmaker, his relentless pragmatism took him into any realm he deemed opportune, from the corridors of Whitehall to the palaces of Center Jap sheikhs, in later years often sporting a trademark scarf and sovereign rings.
Bernstein’s singular skill to persuade, persuade and adapt would finally change the face of his metropolis.
Born in April 1953 to Jewish mother and father within the multicultural north Manchester suburb of Cheetham Hill, Bernstein’s path to the highest of English civic management was uncommon then and even rarer now. Becoming a member of the city corridor straight out of faculty in 1971 as a junior clerk, he served in its neo-gothic environs for practically half a century, rising up the ranks to turn into chief government between 1998 and 2017.
His early years within the city corridor had been formative. By the tip of the last decade, Manchester and its surrounding cities had been shedding 121 manufacturing jobs each working day and the conurbation’s raison d’être was unclear. “We’d simply misplaced our method,” Bernstein mentioned.
By the mid-Nineteen Eighties, Manchester’s political management had been changed by a brand new era of Labour councillors, impatient for change. The town’s leaders, first beneath Graham Stringer and later Richard Leese, concluded that pragmatism — together with dialogue with their Conservative opponents in Westminster — was important to financial revival.
Bernstein’s abilities proved vital. The 1986 acquisition of Manchester airport by the conurbation’s 10 councils was spearheaded by the younger officer, nonetheless in his early 30s. The early-90s rebuild of the inner-city slums in Hulme, a challenge backed by then-Conservative minister Michael Heseltine, got here to be seen as one in every of Europe’s foremost city regeneration successes. Bernstein known as it one in every of his proudest achievements.
By the point an IRA bomb devastated Manchester’s central enterprise district in 1996, Bernstein — and Leese, who had taken over the political reins just a few days earlier than the explosion, the 2 males forming a partnership that will endure for 20 years — was in a position to put Hulme’s classes to good use. At all times eager to maneuver ahead, Bernstein tended to not speak extensively in regards to the rebuild however admitted in 2017 that piecing collectively the mandatory property offers had represented his “largest mental problem”.
Bernstein went on to assist safe not solely the 2002 Commonwealth Video games, however its legacy, too, negotiating his beloved Manchester Metropolis’s transfer to the stadium constructed for the video games. When the soccer membership was purchased by Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan of the United Arab Emirates, Bernstein used Manchester Metropolis as an anchor for the regeneration of the encircling post-industrial space.
His relentless pursuit of supply impressed respect, confidence and a few measure of awe throughout sectors. Knighted in 2003 for his providers to town, his message to the personal sector and authorities alike was the identical: Manchester was open for enterprise.
Not each gamble paid off. He admitted an try to introduce a congestion cost in a bid to lift public transport funding — a transfer rejected by referendum in 2008 — had misinterpret the room. Through the austerity years that adopted 2010, in the meantime, town’s kids’s division failed and homelessness soared.
Bernstein maintained, nonetheless, that reviving Manchester’s financial system was vital to the fortunes of town’s poor. As Osborne settled into the Treasury, Bernstein helped persuade him of the untapped financial alternative offered by northern England, securing for Higher Manchester the primary English devolution deal outdoors of London in 2014.
By the point he retired, a lot of Manchester appeared dramatically totally different to the post-industrial wasteland that shaped the backdrop to Bernstein’s early profession. International funding poured into town centre, the inhabitants boomed and the conurbation confirmed early indicators of beginning to shut its productiveness hole with London.
When he was requested at his retirement how he managed to steer folks to associate with his concepts, Bernstein was characteristically forthright.
“I put town first,” he mentioned. “I clarify in case you don’t wish to do it, make method for any individual who does.”
Bernstein lived just a few miles from the place he was born, in Prestwich, Bury, till his demise. He leaves behind his spouse, Vanessa, two kids and three stepchildren.
