A newly published report, Building an Age-friendly City Region: Learning from Greater Manchester, highlights the achievements and learning that have come from the past nine years of partnership work between Ageing Better and GMCA.
The report chronicles the journey from the establishment of the Greater Manchester Ageing Hub in the Greater Manchester Combined Authority to the present-day age-friendly ecosystem working across the city region to address inequalities in areas including employment, housing, neighbourhoods, health and wellbeing, and transport.
Here in a Q&A format, Paul McGarry, Head of the Greater Manchester Ageing Hub, and Natalie Turner, Deputy Director for Localities at Ageing Better, reflect on the work so far.
Centre for Ageing Better and the Greater Manchester Combined Authority have had a strategic partnership since 2016. What have the last nine years taught you about collaborating on a long-term goal such as age-friendliness?
Paul McGarry (PM): The past nine years has taught me the importance of having shared values and a shared vision for what we want to achieve through doing age-friendly work. I also recognise the importance of pooling resources and being ambitious in our shared goals. Through our collaboration I have understood the need for taking action in the context of population ageing—particularly focusing on low-income and marginalised groups—while recognising the opportunities of ageing populations.
Natalie Turner (NT): What I’ve learnt is how long it takes to make real change, and how important it is to stick at it to see outcomes. Demographic change is one of the biggest social shifts of our generation—several generations, in fact—and adapting to that change isn’t something that happens overnight. It’s not just about new projects but about changing attitudes and systems. The privilege and opportunity to work long-term with a partner like GMCA, which has kept the faith and continued to invest in this work, doesn’t come around very often.
What big achievement stands out to you?
PM: From my perspective, the most important impact of our work has been on the everyday lives of Greater Manchester residents through our programmes.
In particular, delivering the wide-reaching Pension Top Up campaign, growing and spreading the work of the Ageing in Place Pathfinder, our focus on older workers, on age-friendly housing, and our world-leading work around falls prevention.
Just as importantly, we’ve built a strong ecosystem and alliance of organisations in Greater Manchester who are committed to making the region truly age-friendly. That collective commitment stands out as a significant achievement.
NT: The one that stands out for me as exemplifying the benefits of a long-term partnership is that around employment support. When we started our partnership Greater Manchester had already identified it could do more to improve employment rates for people in their 50s and 60s. We started with research to understand the evidence of what works - and when we found a very limited evidence base, we set out to create our own.
GMCA now runs a programme that is supporting people in their 50s and 60s into work who might otherwise have been written off. This work is not only changing people’s lives, it’s also developing practice and evidence that other city regions are now learning from.
What do you think are the key ingredients for success in partnership work?
PM: Creating a compelling and realistic narrative of the work you’re doing—and why you’re doing it—is key, alongside bringing together a core group of people who share the same values. Indeed, the strategic partnership with Ageing Better was a springboard to creating a wider ecosystem of partners in the region, and having a worker from Ageing Better in the team helped those emblematic projects have a wider reach.
Further, garnering political and senior support is vital, as is developing emblematic projects to demonstrate the aims and objectives of a programme to a wide audience. Finally, involving older adults from different backgrounds at every stage is crucial to successful partnership work.
NT: There are so many key ingredients necessary but I’d have to choose common purpose and celebrating success. Paul mentions Greater Manchester’s ecosystem of partners passionate about ensuring that the city region is a great place to grow old, but the city region has also been a founding and influential part of a growing national ecosystem that shares the same purpose and values. When we started, there were maybe a dozen pioneers, and that has grown now into nearly 100 places across the country that are part of the UK Network of Age-friendly Communities linked to the World Health Organisation’s global network.
We also need to share successes, like those set out in the learning report. For example, this year we held a three-day Age-friendly Futures Summit in Greater Manchester, with GMCA, WHO, and the Universities of Manchester and Manchester Metropolitan University. We brought together more than 300 people from across the UK and internationally to learn from the work we’ve done as partners and to make connections. There is always more to do, but taking a moment to see how far we’ve come together is crucial.
What do we need to do next?
PM: The next phase of age-friendly work must begin with a national conversation about ageing—one that acknowledges the diverse and complex factors shaping how people experience growing older in the UK, both now and in the future. As a key part of this, we must continue to work with Ageing Better to be a joint voice on emerging issues nationally and internationally. At the same time, we must work to raise awareness that ageism remains a deeply rooted issue in our society—one that continues to limit opportunities and reinforce harmful stereotypes.
NT: Maintaining what Greater Manchester has achieved will take sustained effort, of course, but there is real opportunity to scale, or proliferate, its learning and practice to other places across the country. For Greater Manchester not to be one of only a few pockets of good practice, we will need national government focus on this agenda—to create a fully age-friendly UK, where nobody misses out on a good later life just because of where they live.
