Welcome to the This Is The North Podcast, your source of transformative conversations. An intentional challenge to the systems holding back the North of England. Hosted by Alison Dunn MBE, an award-winning charity chief executive and former solicitor. This podcast is supported by the Society Matters Foundation and is dedicated to curating and sharing knowledge, powering the change we need for a more equal and inclusive society.
In this episode, Alison is joined by Michelle Percy, Chief Executive of Develop North and a leader whose career has spanned property development, local government, and regional investment. Michelle grew up in Whitley Bay after her family moved from Glasgow, worked paper rounds and Saturday jobs before going into secretarial training, and built a career in the built environment without going to university. She became a chartered surveyor through life experience roughly a decade ago, and she now runs a London Stock Exchange-listed company that directs the majority of its investment into the North East of England.
The conversation opens with something most of us have never thought about. Michelle started a pension at 18 on her father's advice and like most of us, didn't look at it. When she finally asked where it was invested, the answer was everywhere except the region she had lived and worked in her entire adult life. For a country where the average worker's pension leaves their payslip each month and disappears into funds managed from London, that is not just Michelle's story. It is almost everyone's.
From there the conversation moves into the built environment and what it actually means to build a place rather than just construct buildings. Michelle draws on her experience with the Stephenson Quarter and Ouseburn to explain why successful regeneration depends on long-term leadership, collaboration between public and private sectors, and designing spaces that work for every generation. She is clear that gentrification happens when places are designed to look the same as everywhere else, and that the antidote is local provenance, community leadership, and commitment that outlasts any single funding cycle.
Devolution, Michelle says, will not deliver growth on its own. What will make the difference is restructuring the financial models that currently concentrate capacity and spending in the civil service in London. She critiques the legacy of PFI contracts that expire and leave the public sector with the liability, and sets out the case for evergreen investment vehicles that are designed to last for generations rather than the length of a contract.
Michelle also raises a question that deserves more airtime than it usually gets. Ten million men in the UK hold investments. The figure for women is 6.7 million. The reasons are structural, from caring responsibilities to the widening pay gap, but Michelle argues that the caution many women feel about investing can itself become a source of financial vulnerability over time. She is honest about her own experience: she did not follow her father's advice to grow her pension, and she is learning now what she wishes she had understood decades ago.
Timestamps:
00:00 Intro
02:43 Why the North East is home
09:34 Resisting gentrification
15:38 Public and private sectors
28:50 Capital concentration
39:43 Closing thoughts
The thread running through the whole conversation is ownership. Who owns the buildings, who owns the decisions, and who owns the money that could change a region. Michelle Percy's argument is that the capital already exists in the pensions and savings of people living in the North East, and that the job now is to build the structures that keep it here.
Develop North is one attempt at that. The wider question, about whether devolution and regional investment can redirect the flow of capital that has been heading south for decades, belongs to all of us.
Host: Alison Dunn
Guest: Michelle Percy
This podcast is produced by Purpose Made.
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