Manchester City Council Item 7 Personnel Committee 2 March 2016 Manchester City Council Report for Resolution Report to Personnel Committee - 2 March 2016 Subject: Project Director: Factory Manchester and structural changes in Strategic Development Report of: Chief Executive ___________________________________________________________________ Purpose This report seeks to establish a new fixed term role of Project Director for Factory Manchester for a period of up to 4 years to cover the period between June 2016 and January 2020. Recommendations: The Personnel Committee is recommended to: 1. Approve the creation of a position of Project Director for Factory Manchester at a salary of up to £140,000 for a period of up to 4 years and make a recommendation to Council on the remuneration for the post in line with the Council’s Pay Policy. 2. To appoint a subcommittee of four members to act as the appointment panel for the appointment of this position, with a quorum of three of the members for a meeting of the subcommittee. 3. To appoint a member as the Chair of the subcommittee. 4. To co-opt onto the subcommittee, as a non-voting member, a nominee of the Arts Council England so they may attend meetings of the subcommittee and be present during the consideration of any confidential business. 5. To delegate authority to the Deputy Chief Executive (Growth and Neighbourhoods), in consultation with the Chair of the subcommittee, to progress all aspects of the recruitment of the Project Director: Factory Manchester up to the point where a meeting of the appointment panel is necessary. 6. Approve an amendment to structural reporting lines for the Strategic Director (Strategic Development) and the structural position of the City Centre Growth and Regeneration team. Wards affected: All Item 7 – Page 1 Manchester City Council Item 7 Personnel Committee 2 March 2016 Financial consequences for the revenue budget The costs will be met from the overall project budget. Funds have been made available through the drawdown of £3.5m for 2015/16 from the Government pledged £78m capital allocation, to ensure that the procurement of design services can commence. This fund is being administered through a grant provided by Arts Council England (ACE) as part of the development funding for Factory to be allocated by the end of June 2016. Financial consequences for the capital budget None Contact officers: Name: Sara Todd Position: Deputy Chief Executive (Growth and Neighbourhoods) Telephone: 0161 234 3286 Email: [email protected] Name: Eddie Smith Position: Strategic Director (Strategic Development) Telephone: 0161 234 3030 Email: [email protected] Name: Maria Balshaw Position: Director of Culture Telephone: 0161 275 7454 Email: [email protected] Name: Shefali Kapoor Position: Strategic Business Partner – Growth and Neighborhoods Telephone: 0161 234 4282 Email: [email protected] Background documents (available for public inspection): The following documents disclose important facts on which the report is based and have been relied upon in preparing the report. Copies of the background documents are available up to 4 years after the date of the meeting. If you would like a copy please contact one of the contact officers above. • Factory Manchester Vision document • Outline Business Plan: Factory Manchester (submitted to DCMS October 2014) • Report to Executive – Factory Manchester - 29 July 2015 Item 7 – Page 2 Manchester City Council Item 7 Personnel Committee 2 March 2016 1. Background 1.1 Factory Manchester is a £110 million total project cost new multi art form space in Manchester, for the benefit of the wider north. With £78 million capital funding in place from Her Majesty’s Treasury, released through the Department of Culture, Media and Sport, and with commitment of a further £7 million from Arts Council England, and a fundraising plan developed for the remaining funds, the Project now requires a full time Project Director to oversee the capital build project, the creation of a sustainable operating model for the building and to lead the fundraising campaign for the balance of capital and revenue funding. The post is required from the end of June 2016 to end of January 2020, 3 months after Factory has opened. 1.2 The Executive previously endorsed a report on Factory Manchester on 29 July 2015, which set out progress in taking forward proposals for its delivery in the St Johns area of the city centre. 2. Strategic Context 2.2 Factory Manchester is where the art of the future will be made. Factory Manchester will combine digital capability, hyper-flexibility and wide open space, encouraging artists to collaborate in new ways. It will be a new kind of large-scale venue that combines the extraordinary creative vision of Manchester International Festival (MIF) with the partnerships, production capacity and technical sophistication to present innovative contemporary work year-round as a genuine cultural counterweight to London. 2.3 Factory Manchester is the centre piece of St John’s, the 15 acre site around the former ITV:Granada studios, which is being developed by Allied London in partnership with Manchester City Council to deliver a cultural enterprise and production district. St John’s will be a seismic catalyst for beneficial economic and social change, driving economic growth by clustering creative industries, digital and HE partners. It will promote cultural innovation, growth, skills development and talent retention across the Northern Powerhouse (Liverpool, Manchester, Leeds). 2.4 Factory Manchester will be a bold statement of the city’s future – as a creative city, a city of invention. Factory Manchester will be a building designed to produce and present the widest range of art forms and culture as well as new forms of technology; film, TV, media and live relays, scientific advancements and the connections between all of these – under one roof. With a floor space of over 17,000 square metres, high-spec tech throughout, and very flexible seating options, Factory Manchester will be a space large enough and flexible enough to allow more than one new work of significant scale to be shown and/or created at the same time, accommodating combined audiences of up to 7,000. It will be able to operate as a large scale theatre space with seating provision as well as a large warehouse space for immersive, flexible use by visual arts or popular music - with the capacity for these elements to be used together, or separately, with full acoustic separation. Artists and companies from across the globe, as well as from Manchester, will see it as the place where they can explore and realise dream projects that might never come to Item 7 – Page 3 Manchester City Council Item 7 Personnel Committee 2 March 2016 fruition elsewhere. For audiences and users of the building there will be a tangible sense that this is a place where art is being made; that as they move around the building they encounter not the polish and glitz of a temple to high art but the down to earth hum of a 21st century cultural factory. And because its programme and design will be unlike that of any other type of cultural space, so its audiences will be different; young, diverse, reflective of contemporary Manchester. 2.5 Factory Manchester will also play a significant role in driving the skills, training and employability agenda for the burgeoning creative industries sector in Greater Manchester and the wider Northern Powerhouse. Integrated into the producing and presenting programme will be an innovative training programme (developed in partnership with Manchester College & MMU) aimed at providing 16-25 year olds with the creative, technical, administrative and management skills they are going to need to develop careers in the creative industries. Our ambition is that Factory Manchester is not just a cultural place-maker but a cultural people-maker too with an accessible, welcoming environment that nurtures, inspires and provokes learning at many different levels. 2.6 To ensure the delivery of this ground breaking building and the creation of a sustainable business model to guarantee its artistic and commercial success we require an exceptional individual to act as client representative for the Council, lead the organisational and commercial work to create a sustainable operating model, and to lead the fundraising to draw the maximum funding possible from arts, cultural and social trusts and foundations and from private funding sources. This is a high level, senior role for an individual who has serious credibility with the arts and cultural sector, including funders, and has the strategic insight, political experience and people skills to steer a complex, multi stakeholder project, which has to operate in a highly visible context. It is recognised that the organisation is unlikely to have the required skills and experience for this role, and as such it is proposed to test the external market. 3. Proposed Arrangements 3.1 In order to deliver this ground breaking project, it is proposed that a Project Director for Factory Manchester, reporting to the Chief Executive, supported by Factory SRO, Maria Balshaw is appointed. This fixed term appointment of up to 4 years is proposed to run from the end of June 2016 until the end January 2020. This form of fixed term contract is common within the arts and cultural sector. It is expected that the role will attract a good field of suitably qualified candidates, who are familiar with this form of appointment and would relish such a role. 3.2 The postholder will be the single coordinating force for this multi-partner, complex capital cultural project. They will also be the single voice and public face for this complex, high profile government supported project. The candidate will be a leading figure in UK or international arts with experience of ambitious venue management, business planning and capital development.