Bolton MBC chief executive Tony Oakman is a northerner by choice, rather than birth – and it's the accent that gives him away. Born and brought up in Hackney by a single mum, he says: ‘I didn't do as well at school as I should have done, so I decided to go to university at Lancashire.'

It was his first taste of the North – and where he met his wife. He left with a history degree and no notion of what he would do, but an idea that he wanted to ‘put something back'.