Greater Manchester invests £10m to support Greater Manchester residents to live well

Leaders of the ten local authorities have voted to support new £10m of investment to help start the development of GM Live Well, Greater Manchester's commitment to ensuring great everyday support is available to residents in every neighbourhood.

This investment will come equally from the Greater Manchester Combined Authority (GMCA) and NHS Greater Manchester (NHS GM) and half will be earmarked to go directly to the Voluntary, Community, Faith and Social Enterprise (VCSFE) sector in the region, to support them to lead the work in and with our communities.

GM Live Well is a city-region-wide commitment to ensuring people get the support they need, at the right time, in the right place through:

• A network of welcoming and empowering Live Well centres and spaces offering integrated financial, employment, well-being, health and social support as well as social connection for residents. These will be accessible from any neighbourhood and through our health service.
• Equal, connected and consistent support offers - whether for housing related issues, money advice, employment support, getting connected to community activities or other types of support. They will bring together the best of our public services and be crowded with the local VCSFE groups that already know and serve their local communities so well.
• A ‘Live Well workforce' with a shared ethos and ability to collectively pull support around individuals, families and communities in a way that responds to their unique needs and builds on strengths.
• Moving from a fragmented welfare system to a proactive, preventative, community-led model - that instead of waiting for people to fall into crisis, will invest in prevention, early intervention and community-led health, care and support.

Mayor of Greater Manchester and co-chair of the Integrated Care Partnership Board, Andy Burnham, said:

“Too many of our residents are held back by barriers like poor housing, longstanding poverty, ill health, lack of training opportunities and digital exclusion which they cannot overcome alone.

“GM Live Well is essential to break this cycle and our collaborative approach to deliver it, not just internally across GMCA but alongside partners at NHS Greater Manchester, local authorities and the VCFSE sector will ensure that this support is properly resourced and truly embedded in our communities. 

“Our public services are under intense strain and the benefits system is just not set up to help people into work. We need to radically rewire how we deliver our services and, in Greater Manchester, we've proven that we can do that successfully and we have the ambition and vision to go further.

“This funding is the first step towards that vision, and a Greater Manchester where every person can access positive, practical support every day to improve their lives.”

The funding will sit alongside £10m of government funding announced last year, when Greater Manchester was identified as one of the Government's eight trailblazer areas. That will aim to reform employment support in the region, working as part of our Live Well system to provide tailored support to residents to support them on their journey to good work..

Also celebrated at the Combined Authority meeting was the creation of a Live Well Communities Fund, a partnership between GM Live Well, 10 GM and the Greater Manchester Mayor's Charity, to invite more investment into our region's community groups and organisations so they can be empowered and resourced to support residents in the way they know works best. This spring, over £1m is being made available, through every locality, as part of a first ‘prototype' year for the fund. This is in addition to the £10m to start the implementation of Live Well.

GM Live Well will see a new way of bringing health and public services together, led by the region's communities and tailored to individual circumstances, taking the pressure off overstretched local NHS services.

In time, every GP will be supported to connect into GM Live Well so that anyone who needs non-medical support will be routed into the local eco-system of support and advice including the ‘Live Well workforce'. And health services will proactively reach out into the places local people already use and trust.

This is a whole system, whole society approach to break through silos and barriers together - joining-up from the bottom-up.

Mark Fisher, Chief Executive, NHS GM said:

“GM Live Well holds strong to the principle that communities know their own circumstances best and should be able to participate in shaping the places they live in and the services they use. That when this is at the heart of a wider shift towards place-based public services and a system focused on prevention.

“The commitments we are making to GM Live Well will lead to better outcomes and a more sustainable system for all, supporting health creation, social connection and economic inclusion. By working differently, we can ensure communities are central to decision-making, service design, and neighbourhood development.”

Notes to editors

• Greater Manchester's vision builds on Live Well as a programme and a movement for community-led health and wellbeing that has been gaining momentum since February 2024.
• Supported by £1million from the National Lottery Community Fund, the largest community funder in the UK, which has been funding ‘accelerator work' in five areas of Greater Manchester, plus events which give people across Greater Manchester an opportunity to come together to build our movement and galvanise the whole GM ecosystem around community-driven prevention.
• It also builds on the successes of Greater Manchester's Working Well programme that has been piloting innovative ways to support people back into work for a decade. The programmes have supported over 70,000 Greater Manchester residents to date, unpicking a wide range of barriers to work. At the heart of Working Well are the main principles of a keyworker model, 1-2-1 personalised and sequenced support, and integration with the wider GM ecosystem.