Financing smart urban infrastructure that works at scale

Okay, we've got to close up in a minute, but I want you all each to look out to 2035.

And if you were to write a headline or look at something on cities, infrastructure and digital and AI, what would a headline be of where you hope we can

be? By 2035, I would hope economy in Greater Manchester, which has gone from 66 billion GVA to 90 billion in the last eight years, is now at 120 to 140 billion.

as a city region.

But importantly, it's still a great place, an even better place to to grow up, to get on and grow old.

Oh, that's wonderful.

I would agree.

It's got to be a great place to live in, otherwise we've got this all wrong, right? But I think when public and private sit together and you don't see...

The city just works, and it's tech-enabled, and it works for you as the citizen and whatever your day-to-day is, and you don't see the...

It's seamless between public and private, but yet in the background...

It's everybody addressing all of your services.

So I just believe we can live in a great city with all the back end, with a whole ecosystem solving that for us.

But as a citizen, it doesn't really matter because it's providing that citizen services in that seamless manner.

That would be ideal.

And it's a managed piece and all of that works in the background.

And it's no longer a blocker to providing a great city to live in.

I think for me, you know, I think 2035 and I think about my my kids and, you know, how old will they actually my my daughters will be entering the workforce at that time.

Right.

And, you know, I think about what I want to see.

I would actually love for them to see government and the public sector as a place for entrepreneurship.

That sounds in some ways sort of counterintuitive, right? But no, actually, the only way in which we're going to change this relationship between public and private, if we understand that they're actually not that different, that at the end of the day, public and private sector should both be solving problems.

They just are taking slightly different resourcing models to do that.

And I would love to see my daughters want to be problem solvers and be open to a career in either sector as a means for entrepreneurship.

I love that are going back and forth across the sectors and being bridge builders is what we like to call them.