Challenge 3: Stockport Council

Michael Barrett:
It's challenge three and we have reached the midway point of the Local Government Challenge 2026 and we're in Stockport in the North West. This is a really great council to work with and this challenge is all about regeneration and community engagement.

Virginia Ponton:
At each challenge, the teams focus on different topics and different outputs for the council that's hosting them. And we find that by challenge three, they're really starting to hone their skills at this point. They're often feeling more confident. They know each other more, so they know the skills within the group, how they can lean on them a bit more to approach each challenge. What's different about this challenge is that we're working with the council and the Mayoral Development Corporation, which is a different area of learning for the contestants.

Michael Barrett:
The teams have been on a great session this morning where they got to join the council all-staff briefing with the Leader and Chief Executive. And then they've gone on a range of walking tours across the town to see that regeneration in action. The first tour was in the town centre and the contestants got to see some of the amazing regeneration that's already happened. And then this afternoon, they've gone further out to the outskirts of town where they're seeing what future plans are gonna be taking place.

Francesca Jones:
Stockport's regeneration programme is the biggest in the country in the town centre and been really going strongly for over a decade now. And we've seen the products of that all around us. So the physical transformation of the town centre, but really importantly, the bringing back life to the town centre in all sorts of different ways. We're a borough that, yep, is absolutely got an urban heart right near the Manchester border but stretches right down to the edge of Cheshire and over to High Peak. We're at this really exciting phase here. So we've just in February expanded the boundary of our Mayoral Development Corporation and that's to enable us to have a delivery vehicle to bring to life the ambition of the council back by the GM mayor to deliver 8,000 homes in our town centre over the next 15 years. So what we'd really like people to respond to and the challenge that we've laid down is how should we take forward that engagement and consultation approach over the next year particularly?

N‘jaindeh Lungoci
When I saw this question and it was about engagement and regeneration, this is something I've kind of been thinking about more recently. And I thought it would actually be a good opportunity to test the ideas and the thoughts that I have on engagement to see if they could actually benefit the council and support its regeneration efforts and to ensure that the residents were at the heart of any decisions made.

Aaron Clarke:
A lot of what they want to look at is, you know, how they tell the story of what's happening and again, get people to engage with it and bring them along. The comms part of it is very important and this council seems to do quite a lot of that kind of stuff already. So for me in this challenge, I think there's a lot of that part of things. It's about not just telling the story, but bringing people along, giving them a voice and giving them a Stockport that actually reflects them.

N’jaindeh Lungoci:
We're gonna have the pictures and the stories of residents who live all around town and they're gonna be everywhere on canvases explaining who they are, where they come from, what they want in the future and how the regeneration benefits them. There's also gonna be a traffic light system and that's just to ensure that all residents are able to understand what the engagement is and how it is that they can have an input. And we wanted to do that just to be transparent from the onset. We don't need to hide that sometimes there's a statutory duty or a limitation that's out of our control. So we want them to know these things.

Aaron Clarke:
Probably the biggest challenge for this question has actually been establishing what that single vision that they were after was because there are quite a few different elements to it and bringing it together with that, again, that one vision for what they want to do moving forwards. We had so many different ideas and it was just about distilling that down into something that they can actually take away and implement. So as a leader, that was a challenge to make sure that, again, people had their opportunity to raise their points, the directions that they felt that they should move in but also ultimately an end point where we made a decision as a group about where we were going to go and take that forwards.

Michael Cullen:
So the winners in terms of the challenge in Stockport were Team Paradigm. We were so impressed with both teams, some of the brightest talent that local government have to offer. Team Paradigm really put themselves in the shoes of our residents, really got Stockport and provided us with a strategy to practicalities of delivery and ideas that I know we're going to take forward straight after the meeting that we've just had. Both teams were extraordinary. They've only spent 24 hours in Stockport and they've come up with some incredible ideas. I think Team Paradigm just took it to that next level of deliverable, practical ideas we can take forward straight away and I think that was the key difference.

Aaron Clarke:
Got some fantastic feedback actually. Yeah, look, it's disappointing not to win but actually that's not why I do this. I'm here to put myself out of my comfort zone majorly. I actually feel like we did a really good job. I think we smashed the presentation, I felt really good about it afterwards and ultimately what I want is to feel like we put our best foot forwards again at the end of the day and I know how much of a good job the other team did as well. It is an incredibly intense experience but it's a huge amount of fun. I think it makes you feel alive. You know, it gives you the opportunity to do something you don't do usually and for me, I think for anybody looking to do it, I would say throw yourself in the deep end, have fun, go with it and if it doesn't go perfectly, that's also part of the experience.

N’jaindeh Lungoci:
It feels amazing. Being on the challenge as a whole has exposed me to so much that I didn't even think was possible if I'm gonna be honest with you and learning from everybody on the challenge as well. Their skills are so varied. There's not one person who does like the same thing as somebody else. So what I've learned from here and what I'm gonna take away is that there is just so much to learn and I'm quite excited to have had the opportunity to try out so many different councils in different service areas and different complex issues and to resolve them. So yeah, I'm just gonna take away that experience. It's been great.