Part 2 of a three-part series on what Andy Burnham could mean for UK entrepreneurs. Part 1 covers Manchesterism goes national. Part 3 covers rates, NI and the corner shop.
Start with the numbers, because the numbers are the argument. Greater Manchester’s Good Growth Fund is a £1 billion pot, and its first £400 million wave is projected to deliver nearly 3,000 homes, more than 22,000 jobs and 2 million square feet of employment space, across a pipeline of more than 30 projects spread over the region’s 10 boroughs, according to Invest Manchester and Manchester City Council. It was announced in late November 2025, and at the time it read as an ambitious regional experiment.
It reads differently now. Keir Starmer resigned on 22 June 2026, Andy Burnham won a by-election that month, and by mid-to-late July he is likely to be Prime Minister. The Good Growth Fund is no longer a Manchester story. It is the most detailed draft of what a Burnham government’s economic policy could look like on the ground. The first part of this series covered the politics. This time, the plumbing: where the money comes from, what it buys, and how an owner-led business gets anywhere near it.
On this page
- What does the fund actually pay for?
- Where does the money come from, and why should you care?
- How does a small firm actually plug in?
- Can this actually scale to a whole country?
- So what should you actually do?
What does the fund actually pay for?
Strip away the launch-day language and the fund backs five broad things, per Invest Manchester and Manchester City Council: homes, town-centre regeneration, transport infrastructure, employment sites and innovation spaces.
Notice what that list is not. It is not a grants scheme for startups, and there is no portal where a founder pitches an idea and receives a cheque. The money goes into places and projects: a housing scheme here, a refurbished town centre there, an employment site in a borough that has not seen serious investment in decades.
That distinction matters, because it changes how you should think about the opportunity. If you are waiting for “Burnham money” to arrive in your business bank account, you will wait forever. If instead you ask “who gets paid when a town centre is regenerated or a 200,000 square foot employment site is built?”, the list gets long quickly: contractors and subcontractors, surveyors, architects, planning consultants, fit-out firms, landscapers, signage makers, security companies, cleaning firms, caterers, software providers to all of the above, and eventually the tenants who occupy the finished space at rents a new business can afford.
Public investment funds rarely pay founders directly. They pay the ecosystem around a project, then they change the economics of a place. Both of those are addressable if you know where to stand.
Where does the money come from, and why should you care?
The financing structure is the genuinely novel part, and it is worth two minutes of your attention because it explains why this model travels.
The fund draws on four sources: Greater Manchester’s integrated funding settlement, an initial £300 million of investment from the Greater Manchester Pension Fund, borrowing against retained business rates, and a partnership with the National Wealth Fund (Invest Manchester; Insider Media). On top of that, the first £400 million wave is expected to draw in around £1.3 billion of private investment.
The foundation underneath all of this is the “trailblazer” devolution deal agreed in March 2023, which, as the Institute for Government explains, gave Greater Manchester a single, integrated funding settlement, the first of its kind for an English region. Instead of dozens of separate ring-fenced pots from Whitehall, the region gets one settlement covering five areas: local growth and place, local transport, housing and regeneration, adult skills, and retrofit and decarbonisation. It went live in April 2025.
Why does a founder care about Treasury plumbing? Because the integrated settlement is what lets a mayor act like an investor rather than a grant administrator. When housing money, transport money and skills money sit in one pot, you can fund a whole place: the homes, the tram stop, the workspace and the apprenticeships that staff it. And because the Good Growth Fund is structured as a revolving fund, with loan repayments recycled into future projects, the £1 billion is designed to go around more than once. That is patient money, and patient money changes what gets built.
If Burnham reaches Downing Street, the live question is whether this becomes the national template: integrated settlements for more regions, pension capital drawn into local projects, business rates retained and borrowed against. He would arrive in office with the one thing new governments usually lack, a worked example.
How does a small firm actually plug in?
Here is the practical map, matching what the fund backs to where an owner-led business can realistically position itself.
| What the fund backs | How a small firm gets near it |
|---|---|
| Homes and town-centre regeneration | Supply into construction and professional services chains; open or expand premises in regenerating centres before rents move |
| Employment sites and innovation spaces | Become a tenant; new space is built precisely for growing firms that have outgrown the kitchen table |
| Transport infrastructure | Sub-contract and supply; watch where connectivity improves and site your business accordingly |
| Skills and apprenticeship conditions | Take on apprentices through funded programmes; if you sell training, this is your buyer |
| Local supplier conditions | Get procurement-ready: registered, insured, accredited, and visible to main contractors who must source locally |
The last two rows deserve expansion, because they are the quiet heart of the model. Centre for Cities, writing on 30 June 2026, describes Burnham’s “good growth” approach as place-based, investment-led, housing-focused and underpinned by devolution, and highlights the idea of a “Good Growth Contract”: conditions attached to public investment, such as apprenticeships, local suppliers and environmental standards.
Read that from a small firm’s point of view. If a developer taking public money is contractually required to use local suppliers, then being a credible local supplier becomes a route to revenue that larger national firms cannot easily take from you. The paperwork most small businesses put off, insurance, accreditations, health and safety documentation, a basic capability statement, becomes the ticket price for a protected slice of a very large pipeline. The same logic applies to apprenticeships: a system that rewards contractors for local training makes the firm that offers placements a more attractive partner.
For property and regeneration-adjacent founders, the signal is simpler still. More than 30 projects across 10 boroughs, per Invest Manchester and Manchester City Council, is a published map of where footfall, tenants and demand are about to be created with public money. The fund tells you where the next high streets are being underwritten.
Can this actually scale to a whole country?
Honesty requires the caveat. Centre for Cities, in the same 30 June 2026 analysis, asks openly how the model scales nationally, and it is the right question. Greater Manchester has spent a decade building the institutions that make an integrated settlement work: a mature combined authority, a pension fund willing to commit an initial £300 million, and a project pipeline ready to absorb capital. Most of England does not have that machinery yet. A Burnham government could legislate for integrated settlements everywhere, but it cannot legislate for ten years of institutional practice.
There is also sequencing risk. The fund’s first wave was announced in late November 2025 and the integrated settlement only went live in April 2025. The projected outputs, the homes, the jobs, the floorspace, are projections. A national rollout would be scaling a model before its first cohort of projects has fully proved itself. That is not a reason to ignore it. It is a reason to treat the next 18 months of Greater Manchester delivery as the best available evidence about what a Burnham economy rewards.
So what should you actually do?
Three things, none of which require you to be in Manchester.
First, if you are anywhere near construction, professional services, training or facilities, get procurement-ready now, while the national version is still a manifesto rather than a framework. Second, if you are choosing premises in the next two years, study where place-based money is landing, or is likely to land, and position ahead of it rather than after it. Third, if conditions like local supply chains and apprenticeships become standard nationally, as Centre for Cities suggests the Good Growth Contract idea implies, decide early whether you want to be the firm those conditions are written for.
The deeper question is one worth sitting with. For forty years, British small businesses have been told the state’s job is to get out of the way. The Good Growth Fund proposes something different: a state that co-invests, attaches strings, and expects local firms to be on the other end of them. If that becomes national policy this summer, the founders who win will be the ones who learned to work with that state, not around it. Which kind are you planning to be?
Turning a policy shift into a plan you can act on is exactly the sort of thing Mowbray helps founders with, from what-if to what’s next. If it would help to talk it through, get in touch.
From the archive
- CHIPS turned semiconductor capacity into an industrial-strategy market
- Expanded EMI, EIS and VCT limits strengthened the founder-finance toolkit
- Scale-up policy focused on direct capital and reducing growth friction
Sources
- Invest Manchester: Greater Manchester £1bn Good Growth Fund announced. Fund size, first-wave outputs, funding sources, revolving structure and expected private investment.
- Insider Media: Burnham unveils £1bn ‘GM Good Growth Fund’. Corroboration of the £1bn fund, £400m first wave, £300m pension-fund investment and £1.3bn expected private investment.
- Manchester City Council: Manchester welcomes share of new joint £1bn GM Good Growth Fund. Independent report on the fund’s scope and revolving structure.
- Institute for Government: Trailblazer devolution deals. The March 2023 deal, the integrated settlement’s five areas and its April 2025 start.
- Centre for Cities, 30 June 2026: What does Andy Burnham think “Good Growth” is? The “good growth” approach, the Good Growth Contract and questions over national scaling.