Are these people about to change Bristol for good?

With their sticker name tags and assorted lanyards they may look like a lost bunch of delegates at a local government conference – but there’s more to these lot than meets the eye.

For there’s something big happening at City Hall, and they are all part of. So big, in fact, that heads are already turning in other cities around the country – and even around the world.

Welcome to Marvin Rees’ City Office, launched on Thursday with the aim of changing the way Bristol is governed and the people who govern it.

For years, local government and the council has had a top-down approach. But the new mayor has thrown the doors open at City Hall to bring in key players to take a chair at a new top table, pool their resources and do their bit to help tackle some of Bristol’s biggest challenges, from the housing crisis to homelessness.

There’s Bristol’s police commanders, business top dogs, union leaders, university chancellors, charity CEOs … the list goes on.

Introducing his City Office to them all, Rees said a back-of-a-fag-packet calculation shows that the 75 people he has brought together have combined control of £4 billion and influence over 50,000 members of staff.

The idea to harness these resources was first floated by the mayor in a column on Bristol24/7 before he was elected. Four months into his first term, the City Office has now met twice and was officially launched on Thursday.

Robin Hambleton, a professor of city leadership at UWE, said he has been keeping a close eye on developments.

“We’ve seen other councils do similar stuff with good partnerships. But this is rather different. It’s a solid commitment with people seconded into an actual unit – a City Office – to actually make progress and tackle specific initiatives,” he said.

The first major issue the office is looking to address is spiraling homelessness in Bristol. Thursday also saw the launch of homeless charity St Mungo’s’ new campaign, Bristol Street Aware – an initiative aimed at engaging local businesses to help signpost people sleeping rough to the services available to them.

In the spirit of the City Office, Marks & Spencer, Tesco and the Watershed have already committed to the initiative and the launch will encourage more businesses in the city to sign up to.

“For the first time there is a joint plan,” said David Ingerslev, regional director at St Mungo’s.

“It’s too urgent and too important not to do this together. If you bring together people who have overlaps with their areas of responsibility and power then you’ve got an opportunity to make a real difference and people will want to do that everywhere.”

Rees said his City Office idea is already making waves outside of Bristol. ”I’ve talked to other city leaders about this and there’s a real interest about what we are doing.

“They’re realising you can’t effectively run a place as a load of isolated organisations; we’ve got to look at it in a way that we are interdependent.”

Tony Dyer, the Green Party’s national spokesperson for local government told Bristol24/7 that the city was “trailblazing to a certain extent”.

“There have been initiatives in the past, but this is different. You can already see that cities across the UK – but not just the UK, but in the US too – have started to take notice of what we are trying to do.

“There’s an opportunity here for Bristol to set a standard and a new approach which can be picked up by other cities. If Bristol can do, it will send out a message to other cities as well.”

He added: “This is not just about politics, it’s about the different sectors working together – whether that be the business sector, charity sector, trade unions, the universities and so on – there are massive levels of resources available and it’s about bringing them together and adding them to the mix.”

However, addressing his office of seconded city leaders and partners in front of the media for the first time, Rees warned that the City Office is still a work in progress.

“We’ve identified the challenge and we’ve come up with a possible solution. It might be the case that in the first instance it doesn’t work, but that doesn’t mean we’ve identified the wrong challenge.”

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