Preston's business and civic economy: procurement and wages

The one thing Preston is genuinely cited for outside Lancashire, and it is not a building.

This strand covers Preston's business and civic economy. Its subject is the approach to local economic development that has come to be called the Preston Model: redirecting the procurement spending of large local institutions towards suppliers in the area, pressing for the living wage, and taking cooperative and community ownership seriously as instruments, never as sentiment.

It is on this site because it is the thing Preston is most written about for outside its own county. A visitor is unlikely to notice it; a policy reader may have come to the city because of it.

What the strand holds

The living wage piece covers the wage floor side of the approach, which is the most concrete and most measurable part of it. Preston and Mondragón covers the cooperative side and the Basque model that informed it.

Between them those two pieces are the strand. Material that recorded a single past sponsorship, award or event is not kept, because it has nothing to say to a reader now.

• Wages / 01

  The living wage in Preston

  The wage-floor side of the city's economic approach.

• Cooperatives / 02

  Preston and Mondragón

  Worker ownership and the Basque model.

• Scope / 03

  Business blog guidelines

  What this strand publishes and what it does not.

• Projects / 04

  Invest and regeneration

  The physical side: the City Deal and the key projects.

How it relates to the regeneration sheets

The invest section covers the physical half of the same story: the City Deal, the markets quarter, the university masterplan, the bus station. The journal strand covers the financial and institutional half.

They are two accounts of one thing. A city that decides to keep more of its own spending at home is also a city that has to decide what to build with it, and Preston's regeneration programme is the visible consequence of the procurement argument.

What the strand covers

The subject is Preston's civic economy: procurement, anchor institutions, the funding agreements behind the regeneration programme, and what those produce on the ground. The reason a city of this size has a strand of that kind is the approach its council took from the early 2010s — redirecting spending towards suppliers and institutions inside the district, and treating local pension investment as a development tool.

That drew attention well beyond Lancashire, and it is genuinely checkable instead of promotional: the schemes exist as buildings, the funding agreements exist as documents, and the effects are measurable. Those are the qualities that make a subject writeable about at length.

Where it connects

Most pieces here touch one of four things. The City Deal is the infrastructure and funding framework most of the programme runs through. The key projects index is the scheme-by-scheme view of what it pays for, and the key project areas sheet is the same programme read by district.

The fourth is the university, which sits immediately north of the commercial centre with no clear boundary between the two, and which functions as an anchor institution in the technical sense, and no decoration. The strand scope sheet sets out what this half deliberately does not publish.

Two subjects that arrive here from elsewhere

Two of the strand's original posts no longer stand as pieces, and readers still arrive looking for them. One announced the launch of a season at the Guild Hall; the venue is a permanent subject and a single season is not, so the venue sheet is where that reader is sent.

The other set out how a business could sponsor a city centre event. That is a live arrangement rather than a past one, and it is documented on the sponsorship sheet. Both are the same editorial rule as above: the recurring thing is kept, the dated announcement of it is not, and the reader is put where the recurring thing lives.

One figure is deliberately absent from this strand, and it is the one most often quoted about Preston: the share of institutional spending that stays inside the district. It is published by the bodies that measure it, it is restated annually, and it moves. A number copied here would be a snapshot presented as a fact, and it would be wrong within a year of being written; the argument it illustrates does not depend on it.