Making Manchester Fairer

Making Manchester Fairer is Manchester City Council’s five-year action plan to address health inequalities in the city.

Since April 2022, we have been working with Manchester City Council to inform their strategies on tackling poverty and health inequalites in the city.

Manchester City Council’s 2022 action plan, Making Manchester Fairer, outlines its actions for the next five years to tackle health inequalities in the city. The plan draws on lived experiences and research to address the socioeconomic factors that drive inequalities between people with the worse health and people with the best health. During the development of the action plan, representatives from Policy@Manchester sat on the task group. We informed the group's theme leads of relevant research from the University as they worked on priorities for the new strategy.

As part of Making Manchester Fairer, the Council’s new Anti-Poverty Strategy draws on evidence from residents, organisations and research to produce evidence-based recommendations in four areas: preventing poverty, mitigating poverty, pathways out of poverty, and inclusive and effective delivery.

To inform this work, we brought together key academics with senior economic, public health, policy, education, homelessness and neighbourhood staff at Manchester City Council. Using a roundtable meeting, we discussed new and existing levers to mitigate against the cost-of-living crisis. A longer term project that informed the strategy involved partnership working between members of the City Policy team and researchers from the Austerity and Altered Life-Courses project team at the University.

Following the publication of these two plans, we continue to work with Manchester City Council to inform their delivery.