Michelle Percy started contributing to her pension at 18 because her dad told her to. He also told her to increase her contributions every time her salary went up. She started the pension. But she never followed the rest of the advice. For nearly four decades, her pension was, in her own words, "somewhere over there," an abstraction that would give her some sort of sum when she chose to retire. She never asked how much was in it. She never asked where it was invested. When she finally did, the answer saddened her: everywhere except the North East of England.

The region she had lived in for fifty years, raised her children in, built her career in. Her own money had been leaving the whole time.

Most of us have a pension. Most of us have the same relationship with it that Michelle had with hers. The money leaves our payslip or accounts, and we do not think about it again. The system is designed that way. And for the vast majority of people in this region, the money flows south, into funds managed from London, invested in assets that have nothing to do with the communities that generated the savings in the first place.

A few episodes ago, Sir Nigel Wilson made the case for inclusive capitalism. Capital to transform lives here in the north east rather than just "muddle through" due to a historic lack of leadership, investment, and ambition. Michelle Percy takes that argument one step further. The capital is already here, in our pockets, in our payslips, in the pension contributions that leave the region every month without anyone noticing.

Paper Rounds and Board Money

Michelle was born in Glasgow and moved to the North East as a child when her father was promoted in his publishing job. Her mother had holidayed in Whitley Bay during the Glasgow Fortnight and liked it. That was enough. They moved.

She did not go to university. She wanted to earn. Paper rounds from a young age, Saturday jobs, secretarial training. Her mother was strict about money: put a bit aside, give a bit back for your board. Michelle used to think it was harsh. She now knows it was the beginning of a financial education that most people never get.

She worked her way through the built environment industry, learning on the job, supported by mentors who gave their time. It was only ten or eleven years ago that she became a chartered surveyor, through life experience rather than a degree. Her father had always told her to get qualifications. She resisted for years, and she was right that the credentials did not change how she did the job. But she concedes he was right that they changed how people saw her.

There is something in that pattern. A father giving solid financial advice that his daughter acknowledged but didn't fully act on. A pension started but never grown. Qualifications resisted for decades. She had more guidance than most, and she still drifted into the same passive relationship with her money that almost everyone else has. The system never pushed her toward the choices that would have made the biggest difference.

Another Planet

Michelle now runs Develop North, a company listed on the London Stock Exchange that does something unusual: it directs the majority of its investment into the North East of England. Shareholders' money goes into developments, regeneration projects, and long-term assets in the region. The returns flow back to shareholders. The buildings stay.

The model is what Michelle calls evergreen. There is no contract that expires in twenty-five years, no PFI-style handback where the public sector inherits the liability. The fund is designed to last beyond any individual chief executive, any political cycle, any spending round. Michelle will pass it on. Whoever follows will keep investing here.

She spends a lot of time in London talking to institutional investors. Some of them have never travelled north. Some of them, she says, think the North East is in Scotland. The London market, in her words, might as well be on another planet.

And yet the sums involved are staggering. Michelle puts public sector pension assets alone at roughly £100 billion, with very little directed back into the regions where the workers who funded them actually live. Even a fraction of that, redirected into the North East, would change the economic output of the region. Investment that generates returns and stays.

6.7 Million

Michelle cites the split: ten million men in the UK hold investments, against 6.7 million women. A gap of 3.3 million people.

She is honest that the reasons are structural. Women take more time out for caring. They are paid less on average. The pension gap widens sharply with every child. With less disposable income, the instinct is to protect what you have, not risk it.

But Michelle reframes the risk. Saving protects you today. Investing protects you in twenty years. A woman who saves cautiously for decades may feel financially responsible. She may also arrive at retirement with far less than she needed, because cash savings do not keep pace with inflation. The caution that feels responsible becomes, over time, its own kind of vulnerability.

I think about the women who come through our door at Citizens Advice Gateshead. Many of them arrive at a crisis point, a relationship breakdown, a bereavement, a redundancy, and discover for the first time that they have no financial independence. None of them was careless with money. They were never given the insight, the confidence, or the access to make different choices. When Sarah Breeden was on this podcast, she told me about a woman at a Bank of England citizens' panel who said: "If I'd known that, it would've affected my vote." That was about economic literacy. This is about financial literacy. If nobody explains it to you, you cannot act on it. And the people who never get the explanation are overwhelmingly women, overwhelmingly working class, and overwhelmingly from regions like ours.

Walking Down Your High Street

Michelle describes a version of investment that sounds nothing like a trading floor.

Imagine, she says, walking down your high street and looking up at a building that you helped to build. A development you own a piece of. A regeneration project that your money funded, that created jobs in your town, that your neighbours work in. That is what community wealth building looks like. Visible and local.

She is clear that you do not need to be wealthy to start. Entry-level investment can begin with small amounts. For many people, the barrier is not only money. It is the myth that investing is complex, risky, and reserved for people who already have it.

The mechanics are simple: money that stays in a region compounds in that region. Jobs, buildings, services, confidence. Money that leaves compounds somewhere else.

We talked about more than I can fit here, including the regeneration of Newcastle's Stephenson Quarter, what makes places like Ouseburn work, why devolution will fail without restructured financial models, and the public sector's complicated history with private finance. You can hear all of that in the full episode.

Michelle's dad gave her two pieces of financial advice. Start a pension. Grow it every year. She followed the first and ignored the second. She is the CEO of a regional investment company, and she spent most of her career passively disengaged from her own money.

If that is true of Michelle Percy, it is true of almost everyone.

Until next time, 

Alison