The UK Urban Futures Commission

The UK Urban Futures Commission, produced in partnership between the Royal Society of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (RSA) and Core Cities UK, examines how UK cities are vital to boost growth, repair social fabric and meet our net zero targets.

It states that although cities including Birmingham, Manchester, Liverpool, Cardiff, and Glasgow have undergone a locally led transformation over the last twenty years, but there is still much to do to ensure they reach their full potential. This will not only benefit the people of those cities but their surrounding regions and the whole of the UK.

Bringing the UK’s Core Cities up to their European peers has the potential to add £100bn (around 5%) to GDP each year and if social outcomes could mirror those in London, then this would lift 250,000 people out of unemployment, 1.2million out of poverty and increase healthy life expectancy by up to eight years.

It adds that empowered local leaders, working with the private sector and in a new partnership of equals with government, can raise the £1 trillion needed to realise their potential.

Among the report’s recommendations for national and city leaders are:

• National government should adjust its fiscal rules, to focus on maximising long-term net wealth rather than lowering debt over the near term, removing the unnecessary cap on productive investment in our cities and connectivity between them.
• National leaders should then fully empower city leaders, giving them statutory responsibility for raising prosperity and the tools to deliver this with an end to the familiar competitive bid culture and getting serious about their ability to raise and keep a greater proportion of taxes at a local level
• Cities should draw up long-term local prosperity plans to enhance the economic, social and environmental health, agreed by a broad range of stakeholders, which should sit alongside a return of a national industrial strategy that has cities at its heart.
• Cities should put in place new architecture for the delivery of these plans, such as a Cities Investment Hub to provide expert advice on investment projects and Urban Wealth Funds for professionally managing the assets of a city. 
• New sources of private capital should be mobilised, making greater use of public investment funds focused on supporting cities’ objectives, and by developing a Cities Investment Compact in which five per cent of the asset of financial institutions are committed to local investments.

First published in 2023, this is a ground-breaking and highly influential report that stimulated the national debate around UK cities.

The UK Urban Futures Commissioners were:

• Lord Karan Bilimoria, Founder Cobra Beer
• Jane Davidson, Author of #futuregen: Lessons from a Small Country
• David Hutchinson, Senior Advisor, Social Finance
• Bruce Katz, former adviser to President Obama 
• Professor Michael Keith, Director, PEAK Urban
• Polly Mackenzie, the founder of the Money and Mental Health Policy Institute. 
• Anna Valero, Distinguished Policy Fellow, LSE