A Manifesto for Liverpool City Region launched by Heseltine Institute
University of Liverpool’s Heseltine Institute for Public Policy, Practice, and Place has launched ‘A Manifesto for Liverpool City Region’, bringing together expert interventions from academics across the University on key policy issues.
The manifesto launched 20 March 2024, with a panel of key figures from across the City Region engaging with critically important topics covered in the agenda-setting Manifesto through a lively, informative discussion chaired by Liam Thorp, Political Editor of the Liverpool Echo.
Councillor Liam Robinson, Leader of Liverpool City Council, emphasised the need for longer-term funding strategies (including for local government) to ensure stability and longevity in the delivery of key services.
The manifesto combines nine short provocations from University of Liverpool researchers, each addressing a policy issue, with the School of Law and Social Justice’s Professor Lydia Hayes contributing on the issue of the cost-of-living crisis in the UK.
Professor Lydia Hayes' contribution stressed that this crisis disproportionately affects low-wage workers, welfare recipients, and asylum seekers. The report showed that since the 2008 financial crisis, policy decisions have resulted in stagnant wages and frozen benefits, leaving millions struggling to make ends meet. Her research previously published with the Feeding Liverpool network also showed that increasing numbers of workers in Liverpool turn to foodbanks because they are struggling to cope with insecure and inappropriate employment.
Tackling the ‘price of working crisis’ was found to be equally crucial; addressing insecure earnings, low pay, and poor health conditions. Research has revealed a clear link between poor quality jobs and ill health, affecting workers and their families. Asylum seekers are also entrapped in this crisis, unable to access employment opportunities despite possessing valuable skills. Universal Credit claimants, mainly women, also face dire situations due to inadequate wages.
The report proposes a Workers’ Bill of Rights, including collective bargaining, which aims to empower workers and secure fairer conditions. Many organisations in Liverpool City Region are campaigning for an Essentials Guarantee, a new law to ensure that benefits are always enough to cover essentials like food, household bills and travel costs. This guarantee would protect everyone from the risk that in hard times they could be plunged into crisis over the basic costs of living.
Professor Lydia Hayes, Professor of Labour Rights, Liverpool Law School, shared:
"To achieve fairer, healthier pay and conditions we need new rights to protect us all from the risks of income crisis, from harmful conditions of work and to provide all workers with a decent standard of living. This means a new Essentials Guarantee so that the hardships endured by so many in recent years are not repeated and we need a stronger voice for working people."
Speaking of the manifesto, Professor Catherine Durose, and Professor Sue Jarvis, Co-Directors of the Heseltine Institute, said:
“Our main aim at the Heseltine Institute is to bring together academic expertise with policy practitioners, an ethos which is embodied in A Manifesto for Liverpool City Region.
Against the backdrop of a local, regional, and national policy landscape increasingly defined by policy uncertainty, our academics speak from a position of expertise while discussing key issues. This allows our researchers, who are experts in their field, to bring a critical perspective and re-frame broader political debate to advance our understanding of the policy challenges and opportunities facing the City Region and the United Kingdom.
By commissioning experts from across the University we can zoom out and take an important long view on critical debates from the housing crisis to social care to understand how these issues can be better understood as well as practically addressed by policy makers.”
You can read the Heseltine Institute’s Manifesto for Liverpool City Region here.