That shabby shopping centre...

A replacement for soemthing shabby?

If someone called your shopping centre shabby and outdated and suggested few people enjoy shopping there you’d be pretty unhappy, right?

Wrong. In Westfield’s case it was entirely happy to spread the bad news about Broadmarsh this week.

It may have a motive for releasing the results of a shoppers’ survey, though: on Wednesday, Nottingham City Council planners will vote on whether to give the go-ahead to plans for a £500m redevelopment of the centre.
And Westfield is hardly telling us something we didn’t know already. Broadmarsh is a 1960s Arndale dinosaur which should have been redeveloped at least a decade ago. High end retail chains voted with their feet. To call it outdated is an understatement.
The bigger issue here – one which Westfield has now acknowledged – is that its redevelopment is an opportunity to do more than play retail catch-up.
It is a chance to get rid of a brutalist concrete eyesore and present people who come in from the railway station approach with a proper entrance to Nottingham – one which is modern, upmarket and has street scenes which lead you to the heart of the place.
Westfield’s decision to release information about a survey which lays bare how poor shoppers think the current centre is does more than up the ante at development control.
It also suggests that, after all the years we've been waiting for Westfield to get on with it, the Aussies are at last ready to push the button.
They have already committed to a £40m spend on the main square in the existing centre and the walk that leads up to Bridlesmith Gate.
That side of things seems to have gone quiet, though. Instead, a lot of noise is now being made about the bigger redevelopment and extension of Broadmarsh.
So what’s Westfield up to?

What really defines a successful business?

How do you measure the success of a business? How big its turnover is? How much profit it makes? How long it’s been in business? How many people it employs? How many people have heard of it, perhaps?
It’s probably a combination of all of those things, but the most commonly recognised measures are turnover and profit. Without them, you’re nothing.
But bragging about soaring sales and fat profits isn’t the done thing, certainly not in the wake of the credit crunch, when the four Bs – Banks, Bonuses and Big Business – became dirty words.
Yet without banks and businesses of all shapes and sizes there will be no recovery from the after-effects of the crunch. Hammering banks and business is ultimately self-defeating.
So may be it’s time for business to think again about how it measures success. Turnover and profits remain crucial, but it’s what they support that needs to be emphasised if business is to regain its reputation in the public eye.
So when businesses talk about success, they could characterise it in terms of the contribution they make to the lives of ordinary people – how many jobs they support, both in their own business and at suppliers; how much money they spend locally; how much money they have put into people’s pensions; what they’ve done for the environment, whether its cutting consumption or just tidying their part of town; what they did for a local charity; who they sponsored through college; how the woman who joined as an office junior is now a director.
All of these things follow on from turnover and profit, and it may well become much easier to celebrate those achievements when people have a better understanding of what they bring about.
Large PLCs often produce thumping great corporate social responsibility reports detailing activity many ordinary people might be surprised to hear of. But one of the reasons why they’d be surprised is that these CSR reviews are pitched at shareholders, not the public, and written in the kind of corporate-speak which is almost wilfully impenetrable.
Businesses are here to make money; they are not charities or social enterprises. But that doesn’t mean they don’t have a significant beneficial impact on society.
Business owners often get frustrated that their contribution to the world is not appreciated. Now, more than ever, they need to tell the world exactly what their contribution is.

Wrong turn on bad driving

A few years back, Tony Blair came out with a bizarre suggestion that serial louts could be fined on the spot and marched to the cash till to pay up.
Fine in theory, but critics pointed out that in practice the serial offenders he was thinking of may well be the type whose only bank card was one they’d nicked off someone else.
I think we’re in similar territory with today’s announcement by government that it wants to fine bad drivers on the spot
It sounds suspiciously like the kind of policy dreamed up by spin doctors rather than civil servants. And there are at least two reasons why it might not work.
For starters, there are far fewer dedicated traffic police than there used to be, and the boys and girls in uniform are most likely to spot half-witted or loutish driving when they’re already on their way to something more serious.
Second, serial bad drivers are, I’m afraid, the kind who may well be known to the police already, drive uninsured cars and rarely pay fines. Those guilty of occasional lapses would be better advised rather than fined.
I don’t know about you, but it also seems like shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted: if we’re concerned about overall driving standards, why don’t we make the test harder?
While you certainly have to jump through more hoops to gain a driving licence today I don’t think it is materially more difficult to ditch the L-plates now than it was when I frightened the examiner into submission.
Yet by any measure, it should be. Why? Here’s a couple of interesting facts for you.
In 2002, the number of road deaths in the US rose significantly. The reason? It was the year after 9/11, and fear of being blown up in an aircraft made more people travel on the roads.
Second, it’s a statistical fact that the most dangerous part of flying is the drive to the airport.
When you consider what people are being asked to do when they drive a car and the physical capabilities of the machine they are in control of, the level of skill required to pass the test remains astonishingly basic.
I didn’t really get a handle on speed sense, mechanical sympathy, car control and – most of all – hazard awareness, until I did a an Institute of Advanced Motorists test and a track driving course at the behest of an editor who had agreed I could be motoring correspondent. I count myself as no better than average, and I make mistakes every day.
None of the observational and psychological skills I picked up from those courses form any part of the standard test, and there is no incentive for people to do anything other than the basics. Only insurance costs stop people passing the test in a Fiesta and hopping straight into a cheap, old performance car. Which is like swapping a bike for a missile.
The truth is that governments have always been reluctant to put up barriers to people driving. If they did, we might have a less mobile workforce and fewer car sales.
But tolerating a basic test which delivers basic driving standards in order to keep Britain on the move leaves us with a price to pay: the money it takes to fund emergency services and A&E departments, and the spiralling price of insurance premiums and car repairs.
Will spot fines really change that?

Welcome to the affluent south!

So, the race is on for Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire to get their snouts into a £950m pot of government money intended to help the economy grow.
We’ll need to do a whole lot better than we did in the first round of bids for this Regional Growth Fund.
The Local Enterprise Partnership put together 38 applications worth a total of £112m. And we ended up with next to nothing.
There was much soul-searching at the LEP afterwards, which has sought to understand why some pretty professional applications fully backed by the relevant local authorities got nowhere.
And their conclusion? We need to be a bit further north.
Okay, so that was only one of the conclusions. On a more pragmatic level, the real clue as to why the LEP’s efforts drew a blank is contained in the area’s one successful bid: Molecular Profiles, a Nottingham science business, was awarded £1.6m to support a wider investment programme which will create new, high-quality jobs fairly quickly.
It applied to the Regional Growth Fund itself – and bids direct from business is what the government was really looking for.
There remains an irony here. The government appears to have put itself in a position where it prefers bids from companies, not from LEPs – organisations which IT set up. LEPs are still struggling to establish their relevance to business and this hasn’t helped.
But back to us being in the wrong place. I went to a meeting of the local LEP the other day and heard Richard Williams, director of regeneration at Derby City Council and a LEP board member, say, with tongue-in-cheek: “We are now part of the affluent south, not part of impoverished middle England or the north.”
What he was getting at was a set of government metrics which classify the English regions according to their economic strength. All other things being equal, it appears these classifications have a significant impact on where government money goes.
There is some logic in this. If a regional economy is heavily dependent on the public sector – and those further north are – it makes sense to concentrate support there.
However, judged by where the RGF funds have gone so far, the impoverished north appears to have flexible boundaries, taking in parts of those well-known geographic outposts the West Midlands and the North West (home, of course, to such poverty-stricken sink estates as Birmingham and Manchester).
These classifications are also based on averages, ignoring economic variations within regions. In our case, while Derby has some very powerful and successful global manufacturers like Rolls-Royce, Bombardier and Toyota, Nottingham depends more on services and the public sector.
Neither Nottingham nor Derby are basket cases. Nottingham is on the verge of some substantial investment in retail and transport infrastructure, and the supply chains around Derby are among the best in the world.
But neither are Birmingham nor Manchester. Sure, parts of the regions around them struggle, but so do North Derbyshire and North Nottinghamshire – former coalfield areas which still contain pockets of poverty. So the government has some explaining to do here.
It was pretty obvious from the LEP meeting that it still has some explaining to do with the new Enterprise Zones, too. David Cameron and Nick Clegg came to Nottingham to personally announce that a part of the sprawling Alliance Boots campus was going to become one of the first of these zones, but detail on how it will work remains unclear more than a month after their announcement.
There were vague suggestions that it might be home to a mix of commercial and residential development, while Boots exec Patrick Dunne mentioned the possibility of bringing partners form the health and beauty industry on to the site.
The government is clearly looking for quick progress with Enterprise Zones, which are a key part of its growth agenda. But it may have shot itself in the foot by ripping up the existing government presence at regional level at the same time, thus removing some of the capacity to grab hold of a flagship project at grassroots level, make sense of it and identify the way forward.
Enterprise Zones would have been put in the hands of the East Midlands Development Agency, the Government Office for the East Midlands and UK Trade & Investment. One is going, the other is gone, while UKTI is transferring to a new consultancy.
Among the speakers at the LEP meeting was Maria Lyle, the new assistant director for the government’s Department for Business Innovation & Skills in the East Midlands & South East Midlands. She will be working with Rowena Limb, who has overall charge of BIS’s presence across this ‘region’, and looks likely to be the lead contact around Nottingham.
Her in-tray looks like it’s full of an Enterprise Zone-shaped folder already.

Bringing students to book

He can find inspiration in everything

I had one of those spluttering, what-on-earth-is-the-world-coming-to, moments yesterday afternoon (happens a lot in Baker World).

I was sitting in the office checking a story which has appeared in today’s Nottingham Post, and I must have been a proper sight: mouth open, skin turning purple and head shaking from side to side.

What left me in a state bordering on apoplexy was a story about a scheme set up by a lecturer at Nottingham Trent University to encourage his history students to read books for pleasure.
He was, the story said, “shocked at their reluctance to do so”.
I’ll bet he was. If university study is not about the exercise of an inquiring mind what on earth is it for?
Now, there may be two causes lurking underneath this issue. One is that the students on Nick Morton’s history course are effectively forced to read certain books. So may be after an afternoon scanning The Memoirs of George Sherston they’ve perhaps had enough Great War literature for one day, and would prefer to spend the evening listening to some popular music while sipping a bitter shandy (or something like that).
The alternative explanation – one favoured by paid-up GOMs like me – is that they are part of a generation which is slowly losing the reading habit because so much of the information it consumes is served up on a laptop-shaped plate.

As the very existence of this blog suggests, I have huge respect for laptops and anything which makes information more easily available (as long as someone pays for it!). But – and it’s an Everest-sized but as far as I’m concerned – I do not believe for one moment that everything I need, want or might benefit from knowing is best chosen by someone else.

While it is certainly convenient, I loathe Google’s habit of continually refining searches so that what is served up in the results is what IT thinks I should be told. Similarly, I detest the fact that it will serve up ads based on some of the words it has scanned in my emails (so I’ve turned AdWords off).

I’ve digressed. But it’s the same issue as the one Nick Morton is trying to get his apparently bibliophobic students to confront. Read what you have to, by all means, but don’t stop there. Do what I do – go into Waterstones, look in a section that you know nothing about, and find a book which introduces you to it.

One of my favourite phrases in life is one uttered by the Nottingham fashion legend Sir Paul Smith, one which goes some of the way to explaining why a walk round his shop on Low Pavement is so much more than an encounter with fashions which don’t suit me.
What is the phrase? Don’t look it up on the interweb – that’s a cop-out. Go into Waterstones and ask for his biography. It’s on the cover of a book that’s well worth reading.