Osborne doffs his cap to the worker bees of the North One of the few treats for anyone attending a rather sedate Conservative Party conference this week was clip-clopping through Manchester's neo-gothic Town Hall to various fringe meetings, over the mosaic bees symbolising the city's industrious character and down dark vaulted corridors. Planners briefly considered demolishing it in 1945, but this council hall is one of the most exciting buildings in Manchester. It also houses one of the most exciting local authorities in the country, too. Calling a local authority "exciting" sounds like the wittering of someone who has just spent three weeks in conference events where no one says anything new. But don't take it from me: it's the Chancellor of the Exchequer who has such as high opinion of Labour-run Manchester council. George Osborne is impressed with its worker-bee attitude to policymaking, as well as with the authority's chief executive, Sir Howard Bernstein. So impressed, in fact, that at the conference this week, he picked Manchester to run a pilot scheme on getting more employment and support allowance benefit claimants into work. The Treasury gave the pilot to Manchester after the city set up a successful troubled-families programme. A chancellor and a council getting along so well would be less remarkable were Manchester a Tory authority. The Conservatives have, after all, long used Tory-run Hammersmith and Fulham as a test bed for shiny new policies. But Manchester is Labour through and through, and yet its councillors and officials are more than happy to work with ministers they have very little in common with politically - such as Mr Osborne and cities minister Greg Clark. As Labour leader of Manchester city council since 1996, Sir Richard Leese has worked twice with Tory-led governments, and with the last Labour government. He tells me that councillors" desire to get a good bargain for the city means they'll happily work with whoever is in power. And Westminster politicians like Manchester because it is a pioneering council that likes to develop new policies. "It's in the DNA," says Sir Richard. You can go back 200 years to the birth of the industrial revolution, and you can see that a willingness to be innovative is part of what the city has always been. Manchester is always developing clever new policies. For instance, when you next hear a politician announcing that local people will get priority on council housing waiting lists, think of this city. Manchester has been bumping people with local connections up the housing list since 2010. The council also agreed a deal with the Government that includes a clever "earn back" mechanism, where the city receives millions of pounds from the proceeds of infrastructure improvements that it spends money on. Other ministers have their favourite councils with a buzz about them. There is the well-known "Tri-borough" of Hammersmith and Fulham, Kensington and Chelsea, and Westminster, which share back-room services. Essex and West Cheshire have also helped test "community budgets," pooling funding in one area to create better services. The Government will extend the community budget scheme shortly, but I hear that the Communities Secretary, Eric Pickles, is also considering rebranding it to make it sound more exciting. The way all these councils are being rewarded with more power shows the wisdom of the Manchester worker bee. Those mosaics stand for hard work and co-operation, and all ambitious authorities should want to copy that, even if they'll never have quite such a grand Town Hall.