Yesterday was the regular monthly meting of AGMA/GMCA* Scrutiny Panel at Manchester Town Hall. For me, this was the first meeting since being elected as “Co-Chair” of the Panel, and July was my turn to be in the Chair.

* AGMA: Association of Greater Manchester Authorities. GMCA: Greater Manchester Combined Authority

The Panel, which is made up from three councillors from each of the 10 local councils which make up Greater Manchester is responsible for scrutinising the work of the AGMA/GMCA Executive, which undertakes a number of important functions at a Greater Manchester level.

A new area of responsibility for the Greater Manchester Combined Authority, is transport. Previously this had been the responsibility of Greater Manchester Integrated Transport Authority, now its part of the CA as “Transport for Greater Manchester” (TfGM). Most of this months meeting was looking at how the Panel was going to effectively scrutinise this massive transport area and we had a number of presentations from officers on the subject. I’ll upload the main presentation when I’ve been emailed it last in the week. Members were particularly interested in concessionary fares, and we agreed to receive a special report on this later in the year. It was reported that Greater Manchester is being given a £5 million grant from the Government to develop commuter ‘active’ travel (cycling and walking). Hopefully this will lead to an improvement about how we can use bikes conjunction with the Metrolink system (why can’t they just let us take bikes on off peak??) – hopefully more information to follow.

The second item we looked at this month was the proposed Manchester “Airport City” Enterprize Zone. This is another Government initiative to help develop more jobs through providing incentives for businesses to set up in the area. The “Airport City’ is proposed to make use of some spare land right next to the airport to help develop some high quality jobs. The new business rates received as a result of the Airport City are kept by the 10 Greater Manchester authorities, and used across Greater Manchester. Its early days on the project, and we asked for a further report at a later date.

Please get in touch if you want any more information on these issues. Full papers for the meeting are here. Apologies for the numbers of acronyms!

Tim