A Region Confronting Financial Exclusion
Greater Manchester Mayor Bev Craig has announced a partnership with the Manchester Building Society to restore in-person banking access across the region, framing the initiative as a response to both the accelerating closure of high street branches and the broader cost of living pressures bearing down on local residents. The scheme, unveiled at a newly established Cost of Living Summit held at the Renold Building in Manchester city centre, draws on a model of shared public spaces — libraries, leisure centres, and Post Offices — to host community banking desks.
The backdrop is stark. More than 500 bank branches closed across the United Kingdom in the past year alone, with the North West classified by government research as the worst-affected region. Those closures, according to the same research, exacerbate financial exclusion among vulnerable groups, damage small businesses, and accelerate the deterioration of high streets already struggling for commercial relevance.
The Mechanics of the Partnership
The Greater Manchester Combined Authority is working directly with the Manchester Building Society, an institution that has already piloted comparable arrangements with four local authorities elsewhere in the UK. The model is explicitly commercial in its foundations: the building society will recover its operating costs, while the wider social dividend — financial education, community outreach, and inclusion services — represents the public-interest dimension of the arrangement.
Craig was candid about the logic: “Manchester Building Society is a business, so they will cover their costs. But in terms of education, financial inclusion, and outreach into communities, there is an opportunity for working together.” That framing is significant. Rather than calling for state subsidy or regulatory compulsion, the Mayor is seeking to align private incentives with public need — a market-compatible approach to a problem that could easily attract less disciplined policy responses.
Andrew Haigh of the Manchester Building Society offered a sober assessment of the scale of the problem. “We have lost nearly two thirds of our high street bank branches,” he said. “In many places, that means communities are being left with no services in their area. This isn’t just about access to cash. It’s about the services and support provided. And the people who are most affected by this are the most vulnerable.” His remarks carry weight precisely because they come from within the financial sector rather than from advocacy groups with an interest in dramatising the issue.
The Summit and Its Ambitions
Approximately 300 businesses and charities attended the inaugural Cost of Living Summit, convened with the explicit purpose of mobilising the private sector rather than simply cataloguing public-sector commitments. Craig’s pitch to business was direct: those wishing to “put people before profit” and reinvest in the high street would be welcomed as partners. The language is populist at the margins, but the structural intent — drawing commercial actors into service delivery — is sound.
Craig also addressed the summit on the persistence of cost of living pressures across the region, noting that 43 per cent of Greater Manchester families are currently struggling to meet household bills. She drew on personal experience growing up in Greenisland outside Belfast to illustrate the texture of financial hardship — an unusual rhetorical move for a mayoral address, but one that appeared calibrated to establish credibility with the business and charity leaders in the room.
The Broader Policy Architecture
Beyond the banking initiative, the GMCA is launching a consolidated digital resource, everydaysupport.org.uk, designed to aggregate advice and practical support from local, regional, and national sources into a single accessible platform. The ambition is administrative efficiency as much as anything else: reducing the friction that prevents residents from navigating a fragmented landscape of support services.
The combined package — community banking desks, private sector engagement, and a unified support portal — reflects a recognisably pragmatic approach to urban governance. It does not demand new regulatory frameworks or expanded public spending envelopes. It seeks, instead, to reconfigure existing assets and relationships in ways that produce tangible outcomes for residents who have, in Craig’s words, come to feel that the social contract underpinning hard work and intergenerational progress is “fragile and eroding.”
What This Initiative Gets Right — and Where Questions Remain
The community banking model deserves serious attention from policymakers elsewhere. It works with the grain of commercial reality rather than against it, avoids the inefficiencies of direct public provision, and leverages existing infrastructure — public buildings already funded by the taxpayer — to extend service access without significant additional cost. The Manchester Building Society’s prior experience with four other local authorities provides an evidence base that is modest but real.
Harder questions remain, however. The sustainability of shared-space banking arrangements depends on whether building societies and other financial institutions can generate sufficient commercial return to maintain a presence over the medium term. If footfall is low or the demographic skews heavily toward non-revenue-generating services, the model may prove fragile. The initiative also depends on Craig’s ability to attract other banking institutions to the table — her open challenge to “any other banking institution who wants to get back involved” is an invitation whose uptake remains to be seen.
For now, the Greater Manchester initiative represents a credible, market-oriented attempt to address a genuine and measurable problem. Its success will be judged not by the ambition of the announcement, but by the number of communities that regain meaningful access to financial services over the next several years.