The Preston blog, business strand: the pieces on the Preston Model

The business half of the Preston blog — what the city did with its own procurement, and what the pieces here actually claim.

The business strand holds two pieces. The living wage covers the wage-floor and procurement half of Preston's economic approach, which is the concrete and measurable part. Preston and Mondragón covers the ownership half and the Basque cooperative federation that informed it.

This is one of the two strands of the Preston blog: the business one. The other is the visitor journal, and the two were written for different readers — this half for people following what the council did with its own spending, the other for people planning a day out.

That is the whole strand, and the shortness is deliberate. Everything else the strand once carried recorded a single past occasion; the scope note sets out why those are not kept. A procurement decision is slow to read and slower to verify, which is why the journal carries two long pieces here rather than a run of short ones.

The two pieces in the Preston blog's business strand

• Wages / 01

  The living wage in Preston

  The wage-floor and procurement half of the approach.

• Ownership / 02

  Preston and Mondragón

  Worker ownership and the Basque model.

• Scope / 03

  What this strand publishes

  The editorial scope note.

• Projects / 04

  Invest and regeneration

  The physical half of the same story.

What the business strand is about: procurement, and the Preston Model

The pieces collected here deal with Preston's civic economy, and leave its visitor attractions alone, and the reason the city has a strand of that kind at all is the approach its council took to procurement and investment from the early 2010s onward. Redirecting spending towards suppliers and institutions inside the district, and treating local pension investment as a development tool, drew national attention to a mid-sized Lancashire city that would not otherwise have had it. The shorthand for all of it is the Preston Model: a procurement policy that moved the council's own spending towards suppliers inside the county, and the wage floor that came with it. What the Preston Model actually consists of, as opposed to what it is cited for, is the subject the business strand of the Preston blog keeps coming back to.

That is a subject with a long tail. It touches the City Deal, the Preston Partnership, the university's role as an anchor institution and the regeneration schemes in the key projects index, and none of those are visitor material. Keeping them on a separate strand is what stops the visit sheets turning into economic policy.

How the business strand differs from the visitor journal

The other half of the journal, the visit strand, is seasonal and practical: what to do at a particular time of year, where to take children, how a day in the city can be arranged. This strand is none of those things. It is slower, it assumes an interest in how a city is run, and its pieces stay relevant for longer because the subject changes over years; weeks make no difference to it.

Read from the top of the journal if you want both strands; read from here if the civic economy is the reason you came. The strand scope sheet sets out what this half does and does not cover.

The subjects the Preston Model keeps returning to

Four, mostly. The City Deal is the infrastructure and funding agreement that most of the regeneration programme runs through, and it is a specific document with a name and a date. The key projects it pays for are buildings that either exist or demonstrably do not, which makes them checkable in a way policy rarely is.

The third is the university, which functions as an anchor institution in the technical sense: a large employer and purchaser that cannot relocate, immediately north of the commercial centre. The fourth is procurement itself — where a public body's money goes, and what happens to a district when that changes.

Why it reads slowly

Nothing in this strand resolves within a news cycle. A regeneration scheme takes a decade, a procurement shift shows up in figures years later, and a funding agreement is judged by what stands at the end of it. Pieces written on that clock stay relevant far longer than seasonal writing does, which is the compensation for their being slower to read.

The strand scope sheet sets out what is deliberately excluded, and the visit strand is where the practical, seasonal half of the journal lives.