LEP faces a turning point



George Cowcher: a key voice on the LEP

At some stage in the autumn the board of Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire Local Enterprise Partnership, officially called D2N2 but otherwise known as a LEP, will meet to discuss its priorities.
While it has a lot of priorities at the moment, it has no budget and no full-time staff. So those priorities are going to be slimmed down.
There’s something else it is drastically short of, too: widespread support in the business community. Granted, some of the biggest corporate names have given it time (Bombardier’s Colin Walton leads the board), and Derbyshire & Nottinghamshire Chamber of Commerce chief exec George Cowcher has been its main voice.
But there are widespread concerns that the LEP has simply not penetrated the psyche of your average business in the two counties.
I know from conversations I’ve had with civil servants that there are concerns that the wider business community has not bought into the LEP concept on any level.
I’ve seen a report drawn up by consultants which also says there is evidence that businesses don’t ‘get’ what the LEP is about.
In an article in the Post on Tuesday, Glenn Crocker, the chief executive of Nottingham’s BioCity, will say that many see the LEP as a “toothless irrelevance”, though he also says very clearly that he does not believe it should be written off.
There are three problems here.
One was identified by George Cowcher himself: businesses have got to wake up to the fact that the days of the East Midlands Development Agency, which had £150m a year to spend on the regional economy, are dead and buried. Businesses, organisations and sectors which relied on an emda funding stream have got to stand on their own two feet; there will be no grants to chase.
Mr Cowcher also tacitly admitted the second: the LEP needs to work much, much harder at raising its public profile. The £50,000 odd it has been given by government to support the development and maintenance of economic data is all well and good, but what purpose does it serve when the LEP is largely silent between board meetings?
The third is the contradiction at the heart of government economic policy. It wanted rid of emda because, in addition to wanting to save money, it did not believe a government agency should be leading business by the nose. Its view, which does make long-term economic sense, is that a sustainable economy is built around businesses which grow naturally.
But, as we’ve already seen, the central message from the organisation which has stepped into this void boils down to this: ‘We’re not emda’.
And if the mantra now is that businesses should help themselves, why will they vest time and money in the LEP? Look at what happened in the first round of bidding for the Regional Growth Fund (what was that about the death of regional economic policy?): one Notts business, Molecular Profiles, secured funding by making a bid itself. Not one of the 38 bids from the LEP - a body set up by government - was accepted by that government.
That may be because the local authority economic development people who give their time to the LEP were stuck in an emda mindset, wanting money for infrastructure, buildings and projects when the government was looking to back businesses creating jobs quickly.
The same problem cropped up in other LEP areas. So why was the process allowed to go so wrong for so long? All it has done is eat away at potential enthusiasm for the LEP concept.
The consultancy report I referred to earlier does make a powerful case for the existence of an organisation which furthers cross-county economic development activity and whatever government thinks about regional policy, it does believe business should have a powerful say in that.
Whether you feel strongly about government intervention in the economy or not, it seems common sense for businesses and local authorities to talk about what’s happening to the local economy, and for them both to make decisions based on solid evidence about the size and shape of the commercial landscape they operate in.
If the LEP is to mean anything, then it needs to be much more visible. It needs to hold events, to talk publicly, to get in the face of government, to produce the odd report – albeit within a sharply focused brief which avoids duplicating what other bodies already do.
There is another event in the autumn which could prove pivotal for the future of the LEP. It is the day when Government announces the results of the second round of bidding for the Regional Growth Fund (and don't ask when because no-one knows yet).
This time, £900 million is available across the country, and I know the LEP has made some hefty bids related to both business support activity and the tourism industry.
If those bids succeed, then the LEP has its sense of purpose.
If they fail again, then it’s surely back to the drawing board - for the Government as well as the LEP.

EU couldn't make it up

My phone rings. It is someone-or-other from the European Union.
Am I interested in a story about how much the EU will be spending in our region up to 2020 and would I like to talk to people about how they are going to spend it?
Of course - there could be some opportunities for local businesses in this. So a chance to look at how the money would be spent locally would be great.
It's never that simple with the EU, though.
To find out about how money will be spent in the East Midlands, they want me to go to a three-day event.
In Brussels.
"But if you're spending money locally, wouldn't it be better to talk to someone here, on the ground, to see where it will be spent?"
Bafflement. Silence follows.
"So it is best I say you are not interested in the story?"
No, I'm definitely interested, I said. But I explained that I couldn't spare three days for one story, never mind one in Brussels.
This did not compute. How could someone not want to go to Brussels...to speak to Commissioners...at an event?
I did think about throwing something in about the irony of a story about a local initiative being done abroad, but it would have been lost in translation between one version of English and another.
In any case, we were clearly inhabiting different universes already.
"OK...so you can't do the story."
"Yes, I can do the story but can we not talk to someone here or over the phone?"
"Erm...it's for this event...OK we leave it there."
C'est la vie.

Sickies, slackers and an Age of Entitlement?

Business has never been easy, but these days it is punishingly tough. In many companies there are fewer people doing more and more, and increasing costs eating away at standstill prices.
While I’m on the cynical side of when-the-tough-get-going strategies (because that’s what you should be doing anyway), there’s no question that work these days is about working harder and longer without additional reward. Can it be anything else in this climate?
Apparently it can. There’s a suggestion that at least a few people think a four-day week, cruising through the day and dashing for the door at 5.30 are all you need to do to bring home a good wage.
Who are they? According to George Cowcher, they are our future. What the chief exec of Derbyshire & Nottinghamshire Chamber is referring to is a generation of kids, some of whom seem to think that work means money for the taking.
Now, I normally take a pretty sceptical view of those who shake their head and mutter dismissively about ‘the young people of today’ or suggest it wasn’t like this in my day etc.
But George Cowcher isn’t that kind of bloke, and he was referring to the hard evidence consistently flagged up in a survey of small businesses in Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire.
His starting point was the continuing puzzle of consistently improving exam results versus the consistently poor standards of literacy and numeracy displayed by people who turn up for job interviews.
That, he believes, may be down to the generation of kids who went through schools before a heavy emphasis was placed on those key skills. Exam passes are one thing, practical everyday skills another.
But the apparently poor work ethic is less straightforward. According to Mr Cowcher, at its worst this manifests itself in people who think it’s OK to throw sickies on Mondays because they’ve overdone the pop at the weekend. But it also extends to graduates who think a degree is the automatic route to a handsome pay packet…even when they can’t keep a phone conversation going and rely on a Word spellchecker for their communications skills.
“It is surprising in this climate,” he told me. “But there is a cohort which doesn’t see work as the major driver in their life and wants something for nothing.”
There is a debate here to be had about whether a decade of economic growth, easy credit and the rise of the consumer economy has led to an era of entitlement, an age when people grow up thinking that a high standard of living is something you are entitled to rather than something you have to work your socks off for.
It may be that we’re going through a period of adjustment, and those that go through the educational system from 2007 onwards will emerge with a more realistic expectations about the relationship between rights and responsibilities.
In my experience, there have always been people who think the world owes them a living and moan loudly when it isn’t served up on a plate. And debates like this have a habit of occurring in cycles.
But you can also criticise individual businesses for the way they took their foot off the gas - and their eye off the ball - during a bubble that was never likely to last.
The surprise for me was someone like George Cowcher – an experienced operator who usually chooses his ground very carefully – delivering some unequivocal criticism.
Does he have a point?

John Lewis: Unknowingly undersold?

I was in John Lewis in the Victoria Centre a few days ago splashing out on a new TV (bigger, better picture quality, can connect to the interweb).
I’m no technophobe, but neither am I a technophile and I like to know that, whatever I’m spending, I’m making the right decision.
I seemed to be heading in the right direction thanks to a young assistant who came over, asked me if I needed some advice and identified the TVs in my range which offered better picture quality. He went off to check stock and look at delivery options, so we were on the verge of a deal.
Only it turns out he didn’t work for John Lewis.
I discovered this from another assistant who came over to respond to the delivery query. His opening gambit: “Can I just ask what exactly you were looking for as he isn’t employed by us and he shouldn’t have been talking to you about televisions?”
The scenario isn’t quite as disturbing as it might sound, but it does throw an interesting light on the way retail sometimes operates.
The young ‘assistant’ actually worked for a company selling TV sound systems (which explained why he had started talking about an iPod dock) which had been given time to demonstrate and sell its wares on the John Lewis technology floor.
But he was on the verge of selling John Lewis short and leaving me with a TV which wasn’t actually the best option. The assistant who took over (an experienced old salt who knew what he was talking about and explained things clearly and convincingly) steered me in the direction of a TV which was £250 more expensive – but, technologically, far better. So, in the end a result.
What I found disturbing was not so much the fact that I got collared by someone who had no authority to sell me anything, but that it had happened in a shop where trust is a central part of the sales proposition.
The selling of particular products by people who work for the manufacturer or agent rather than the retailer isn’t unusual – you see product or franchise concessions in loads of stores. But it has to be flagged up – I thought my needs were being met with a product recommended by someone from John Lewis but that wasn’t the case and I wasn’t told. So something, somewhere went wrong.
I like John Lewis a lot. It remains a standard-setter on the high street. To borrow a catchphrase, in this case John Lewis itself was – nearly - unknowingly undersold.

Retail: What will it take for independents' day to happen?

A shattering silence on this blog for the past couple of weeks because I’ve been up in Northumberland on holiday. There was a shattering silence there, too – in all sorts of ways.
While the rest of Britain was (I’m told) gripped by the riots frenzy there was a smashed window at a small police station somewhere near Sunderland and, er, that’s it.
I stayed in the middle of nowhere a few miles outside Alnwick. Beautiful rugged countryside, so dark only a couple of lights were visible in the distance at night, while the only noise was the distant hiss of tyres from a road up in the crags and the sheep being driven into a different field. Bliss.
It took me a few days to get used to the total absence of an internet connection and an intermittent mobile phone signal, though. But they were an early clue as to why this – and other parts of Britain - remain unspoilt.
The biggest clue was in Alnwick itself. It’s an attractive market town just off the A1 whose major draw is the Castle, where some of the exteriors for the Harry Potter movies were filmed. It’s also the only town of any size for miles around.
What struck me was how few national retail fascias there were on its main shopping streets. Yes, there was a WH Smith, a Boots, a Dorothy Perkins a Morrison supermarket and, outside the centre, a Sainsbury superstore.
But its main retail pitch was nearly all local – a butcher, a hardware store, a kitchenware and furniture business, an estate agency, the usual charity shops, a couple of pubs/bars, the odd local country clothing/fashion store, some gift/trinket shops. There is also Barter Books, which is a story in itself. A clone town it ain’t.
Is that a good or a bad thing, though?
Well, there’s been an ongoing debate about the loss of independent retailers and the dominance of national chains serving up the same flavour wherever you go. Indeed, a government-ordered review into this very subject is currently being carried out by Mary Portas, the former Harvey Nichols branding director who found fame as TV’s Mary Queen of Shops, advising independent retailers.
She’d find plenty to occupy herself in Alnwick. Some of the independents were excellent (notably the butcher, which does a damn fine pie). Some weren’t and they clearly lacked either turnover or imagination (or both).
What that translated into was that there was no compelling reason to go to Alnwick and shop for the sake of a browse and a casual purchase. The independents did not serve up the range or the consumer experience that national chains do.
I’m guessing that the national chains will tell you that the demographic data of a community as sparse as rural Northumberland simply doesn’t stack up for them. They’d ask you to hop in the car and drive down to Newcastle or hop on the train up to Edinburgh if you want the full-on shopping show.
Was my experience that of city people tragically hooked on shopping not knowing what to do? No – it was a story about the way the economy works. Major retailers need big catchments with a good wodge of money within a short drive. If it isn’t there they won’t come.
The independents who do set up shop would need to be very savvy to make good money – especially in a town like Alnwick, where tourism makes demand seasonal.
Yet they clearly survive, and there were few empty shop units that I could find.
Could the debate about independent shops learn something from a place like Alnwick? May be – but I’m not sure it’s an entirely optimistic message.
None of the independents were what I’d call indulgence shops. They were in the main places where you go because you need something. The only independent which you could really call a magnet – Barter Books, the book swap-shop housed in an old railway station – is unique, almost a national institution.
Alnwick’s independents survive because there is little competition. They are small-scale enterprises which didn’t look like they made a lot of money and they benefit from being in the only sizeable centre for miles around.
Tellingly, I suspect that the one Sainsbury store on the edge of the town employs more people than a dozen of the independents in the centre.
This isn’t an argument in favour of big retail – national chains are one-size-fits-all operations who have questions to answer about their treatment of supply chains and their regular failure to invest in great service.
But their absence doesn’t guarantee an alternative high street full of brilliantly run or endearingly quirky independents with a distinctive regional flavour. Some of the shops I saw were either utilitarian or just off the pace.
Good retailing is a mix of good products and great service coming together to provide value, and that doesn’t have to be the preserve of big national chains. But it would take a clever, committed and resourceful independent to meet those criteria.
Are they out there? I'm not sure. And the irony underneath this article is that it was drafted while sitting in Alnwick's newest retail arrival - Costa Coffee...