OK, I'm setting myself up here but in the wake of last week's somewhat incendiary Policy Exchange report that some northern cities had 'lost much of their raison d'être' I can confidently assert that the North West is flourishing. When it comes to producing insolvency practitioners, at least.

New PwC senior partner Ian Powell cut his teeth in the region and so did an astonishing number of other senior industry figures.

Alchemy's Jon Moulton (fast-emerging as the go-to guy for TV journalists looking for a credit crunch soundbite), turnaround and football specialists Trevor Birch and Mark Palios, PKF's Philip Long, Deloitte's Nick Dargan, Grant Thornton's Malcolm Shearson, Scott Martin (who worked on Railtrack and is now a director of Wembley Stadium) and many, many others all hail from the region.

Insolvency association R3 labelled Bolton Britain's business graveyard a few years ago, alongside Manchester, based on the number of companies going bust by postcode.

And while the Policy Exchange report was much less well sourced and even more immoderately presented, it would be naive to ignore the link between a region that has had well-publicised economic woes and the growth of a discipline that thrives in the bad times.

Even so I believe the emergence of such a talented cadre of professionals says as much about the power of networks, shared experience and, perhaps, hard work as it does about economic gloom.