Phil Drane is the man with one of the biggest jobs in Cumbria.
Team Barrow ‘a once-in-a-generation opportunity to deliver meaningful, long-term change in Barrow’ is underway with Phil, as programme manager, at the helm.
Arriving in Cumbria just a year ago but with family ties to the county he’s excited at the prospect of helping Furness thrive.
Team Barrow is a trilateral partnership between central government, Westmorland and Furness Council, and BAE Systems with aim of guiding Barrow to be a new powerhouse for the north, expanding BAE Systems’ defence capability, supporting energy security, and revitalising Barrow and Furness as a place where people choose to live, work, and thrive.
He’s been talking to Business Crack’s Nigel Thompson.
How long have you been with Westmorland and Furness Council and tell us about your role so far?
I’ve been with the council almost exactly a year now starting right at the beginning beginning of 2024 and my background is very much in local government for my whole career.
I’m a town planner by background, working within local government, in positions over time to lead, planning, development, regeneration, economic development teams. I’m from London but relocated to Cumbria with my family. It’s where my wife’s family are from and we were looking for new opportunities in the area to be close to home.
Why Team Barrow?
It’s extremely exciting!
I like to think that my skills within the world of planning and development and regeneration were part of the reason why I was given the role. Also I think it’s fair to say that in the course of the last year, it’s certainly been a huge learning curve setting up programme-wide activities that go beyond just planning and development.
As you’ll see from the plan for Barrow while it cover things across regeneration it’s also transport, health, education, community so leading that entire programme is what I’m trying to do.
From your previous work experience in London, have you ever undertaken anything like this at all in your career so far?
Nothing on the scale of what we’re talking about. Individual projects when it comes to garden villages was probably the biggest project that I’ve worked on in Essex and thinking about how we bring all of that together when it comes to town centre regeneration.
When you’re talking about an entire town, and its national significance, which is the whole reason we’re here I could certainly not compare anything that I’ve done previously with the scale of what we’re looking at here which is part of the excitement of it.
Is it daunting?
Across the partnership with the team that we’re building we can draw on experience from the council, BAE and government colleagues which makes it feel more doable.
The scale and excitement that there is around the opportunity is both exciting and daunting in equal measures. I think what we’ve been able to do in the plan for Barrow is define the two core outcomes which are deliver the defence nuclear enterprise and diversify and strengthen the economy. And the reason I can reel that off so easily is because we’re talking about that on a daily basis!
The heavy lifting that’s being done at the moment is the challenge to get us to a place where it will be easier.
There are five different work streams. How will they operate?
The Barrow Delivery Board is tasked with setting the direction for how those work streams will contribute and intervene in the local area in order to make a difference.
Those work streams will be having conversations that are effective, that begin to reflect back to the board the things we think we should be a priority and spending Barrow Transformation funding on to make a difference.
What we’re not saying is just because we’ve got five work streams, that means that the £200 million of transformation funding is essentially split five ways. What we need to do is for the delivery board to set the direction to say, these are the pressing issues and the priorities that we have, and therefore each of the work streams contribute in the way that they need to.
Are there issues that have already emerged?
There’s not too much that is new because many people before me have been working on this and we know what the key issues are, what the main challenges are that we have.
There’s been a huge amount of brilliant work that’s been done in the past, not least the work that the council and other partners have been doing through the Brilliant Barrow Town Deal Partnership to deliver projects such as town centre regeneration, housing delivery, the University of Cumbria arriving.
Improving the town centre, delivering housing that accommodates people in the area, making sure that we have excellent university and learning facilities generally from an education standpoint plus in addition to that, working with partners such as the NHS on things like healthy well being and better facilities.
I think the advantage naturally is that the government is a partner in this and the government is recognizing that Barrow is a priority from a national perspective.
Because you almost have a hotline to government could Barrow be seen as a flagship area for the rest of the UK?
I hope so. Absolutely. How can we make a success of this so that actually we’re the example that’s then being quoted in the future.
Whether it’s from a national or an international perspective the kind of core outcome of what we’re looking to do is because of the significance of Barrow when it comes to national security and the work of BAE Systems here.
So it is about us using that to our advantage. We do suffer with many problems that are well documented and not all are dissimilar from many other places in the country But one thing that certainly makes us unique is the shipyard. It is the work of building submarines and therefore, how do we leverage that position to benefit people in Barrow?
And that’s really what the partnership is all about. How do we make better places have better outcomes for people because of the national significance of us as a place?
The plan sets out an ambition to communicate and engage widely and effectively to spread the word about Barrow’s future. How will you do that?
This is the initial communication piece. This is the initial statement of ‘here we are and this is what we’re doing.’ This is why it’s important. And there’s more to come.
From the outset, I think we’ve always wanted to root that in the need to bringing the community, the widest community in terms of everyone in Barrow and the wider area.
How do we bring people along with us on this journey so that it’s not just us coming along and saying, ‘this is what’s going to happen’ and so there are going to be lots of different ways that that will happen over time. You mentioned the work streams earlier. I think that allows for us to be doing some work on the ground within Barrow with key organisations and partners where there’s involvement in the work at the ground level.
But then also from a kind of communication standpoint, what we’re trying to do is make it clear; here’s our big objectives. Here’s our outcomes that we want to achieve. Here’s our objectives as to how we achieve them. And now we want to talk to people about how that’s going to impact them through the work streams over time.
Other key components are the opening of The Bridge in Portland Walk. This BAE facility will be open to the public where people can find out more about what’s happening and what we’d like to do through Barrow Rising is start to communicate a bit about what that vision is, what the town could look like in the future, how that can benefit people.
So it’s engagement both through an online presence that will have hopefully where we’ll be able to reach people outside of Barrow to be able to start telling the story of what the future of Barrow is so that that becomes attractive and interesting and enticing for people to want to know more and to want to come and work and live in Barrow.
But then also the aspect of on the ground, how do we describe to people the changes, the improvements that will be coming in Barrow that then mean that more people do actually want to come and live and work here as well as those people who are already living and working here? How do we improve it for them?
Are you conscious that people are kind of probably chomping at the bit to see change?
There needs to be the appropriate amount of time to think through how best to design all of this and think about the long term. We also need to be very aware of making a mark very soon so that people can see physically that things are changing and that benefits are coming and that the transformation fund is making a difference.
We’ve kind of got two categories of projects moving forward and there are linkages between the two. There’s the kind of long term outputs when it comes to regeneration and development projects and things that will take time to deliver.
And then there’s the immediate things that we can be getting on and doing. For example cleaning up the town centre, delivering on Brilliant Barrow projects and communicating to people that Barrow is rising. It’s not just a brand making a statement – it is actually something that’s happening.
What will be happening over the coming months?
Over the course of the next six months to a year we’ll have the delivery board established and stood up formally with a chair appointed and a governance structure in place.
This will mean we’re beginning to understand what the challenge is going forward and what we’re going to be allocating transformation fund money to over future years. The immediate priorities are very much going to be focused on how do we make sure that the town centre is improving.
I think we’d like to have immediate impacts within the world of education to assist with schools and further education facilities. I think we’d also like to have immediate impacts within the world of leisure.
There is a lot of work that needs to be done to just essentially baseline where we are when it comes to infrastructure, transport what the issues are currently.
I think we know what the issues are, but it’s understanding it within the context of the growth that is coming. What’s new is that when work has been done in the past, it’s been done within the context of ‘we know these are challenges, but we don’t quite know how to solve them’ because the level of growth in Barrow is not particularly significant.
Now that we know that the level of growth in Barrow is significant because of the workforce growth and changes that will be happening at BAE and the benefit that that could bring to the town, we need to better understand how does that impact on our transport infrastructure?
How does that mean that we will be able to create a viable housing market and deliver the accommodation that people need?
So it’s a different context that we’re working within and what we need to do now is is essentially get moving so that we’re communicating to people the scale of the opportunity and make that exciting to people.
What we want to do is make sure that we’re retaining the people that are already here because they see a positive future for Barrow and we’re attracting more people to come and be here because they too can understand what the future is.
