The Intermediary – August 2026 - Flipbook - Page 67
SPECIALIST FINANCE
Opinion
‘Manchesterism’
through the prism
of practicality
A
s a proud Mancunian,
I have to look at
the phenomenon
of ‘Manchesterism’
without civic pride
and try to assess
it purely through the prism of
practicality, to honestly gauge the
impact this brave new philosophy
could have on our market.
Andy Burnham has spent the
best part of a decade selling Greater
Manchester as a place worth
building in, and as a local myself,
I have witnessed the impact of this
first-hand.
It is less a unique
regional model and
more a transferable
template, and other
combined authorities
have been watching”
This spring, an independent
report into one of his flagship tools
for achieving this finally became
public. Rather than the “gotcha, it’s
just a heady cocktail of debt and
privatisation” headlines, reading a
bit deeper it’s potentially one of the
clearer proof points in the country
that public capital and private
development ambition can work well
together, provided the public sector
behaves less like a casual grant-giver
and more like a diligent lender.
This sort of ambitious reform is
fantastic for all facets of the property
development industry, and most
importantly, for businesses like ours,
and businesses like yours, the reader.
The tool in question is the Greater
Manchester Housing Investment
Loans Fund; since 2015, it has invested
£983m directly into the region’s
housing supply, lending to developers
who then repay the loan with
interest, much as any commercial
lender would.
The numbers in the independent
report are, frankly, hard to argue
with: 84% of the developments it
backed had been completed by the
time the report was commissioned,
delivering 7,800 housing units. It’s
been a financial and practical success,
and has become a fund set up for a
10-year lifecycle that has since been
extended for another 10.
The reason it has been a success
is mirrored in our successes with
Homes England; the formula is
public and private sector partnerships
being run with genuine commercial
discipline, assessing schemes on
deliverability, pricing risk properly,
and geing repaid.
The model method?
This brings us to the more interesting
question for anyone working in
development finance, on either side of
the coin, lending or brokering: if this
Manchester model proves replicable,
should brokers be paying closer
aention to it? ‘Manchesterism’,
for lack of a beer shorthand, is the
model of a metro mayor and combined
authority treating a housing loan
fund as a genuine piece of financial
infrastructure rather than a one-off
grant pot, running it with commercial
rigour, and being willing to extend
and scale it once the numbers prove
out. It is less a unique regional model
and more a transferable template,
and other combined authorities have
been watching Greater Manchester’s
experiment closely. A model that
ALAN FLETCHER
is partnership director
at Invest&Fund
returns tens of millions to both
the local authority and central
Government, while delivering
thousands of homes, is exactly
the kind of evidence that could get
copied elsewhere.
If it does spread, West Yorkshire,
West Midlands and others are
obvious candidates, and brokers
structuring development finance
will increasingly find a public loan
fund siing somewhere in the
capital stack alongside the usual
senior and mezzanine layers, not
competing with private lenders, but
complementing them.
Platforms like Invest & Fund,
working within the Homes England
Lending Alliance and structuring
facilities around exactly that kind of
staged, first charge lending, are well
placed to sit comfortably in a capital
stack that increasingly includes
public as well as private capital. It’s no
longer something unusual to see, the
two aren’t rivals so much as different
tools solving the same housing supply
problem from different angles.
If ‘Manchesterism’ does become
the template other regions reach
for, the brokers who understand
how public loan funds actually
work – their appetite, their pricing
discipline, where they sit relative
to private finance – will be the ones
best placed to structure deals that use
both effectively.
Andy Burnham’s fund didn’t just
build 7,800 homes. It built a bullish
case for a model of housing finance
that the rest of the country would do
well to take seriously. ●
August 2026 | The Intermediary
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