The Skoda Files Part II

Take a high-efficiency turbocharged petrol engine, a'trick' automatic gearbox that's more economical than a manual, mix it with matt black and almost painfully discreet styling and what have you got? Anything from a Seat to an Audi, really.

In this case what we're talking about is a Skoda Octavia, which is what I shelled out on when this blog came back to life a few months ago. Its arrival marked the end of a long association with that middle class cliche the Volvo V70 and the start of life with a badge which - along with Lada, Wartburg and Trabant - used to be the butt of all joke about east European technology.

Not anymore. As the standard kit-list suggests, Skoda today is a confection picked from the Volkswagen Group parts bin, which it became part of a few years back. So while it's still built in the Czech Republic, its design and engineering are very much based on VW's bid for world domination (for which read 'attempt to dominate the market for mainstream cars').

So if you can get over the badge what you are basically buying is the extendable chassis system also found underneath VW's Golf and Passat, Audi's A3 and TT and the Seat Leon. Ditto the 1.4 TSi turbo petrol engine and the seven-speed DSG twin-clutch auto gearbox. It's the same story inside, with upmarket plastics, familiar displays and switchgear and and information/entertainment system which clearly shares its interface with VWs and Audis.

Having squinted at the Passat and goggled at its price, I got over the Skoda badge and went for an Octavia, a car which offers nearly all the refinement you get from its upmarket sibling but at a daft price. It's a sizeable car and while it falls short of a V70's seats-down boot space, it has noticeably more interior space.

More to the point, it's far more economical to run. My 2.5 turbo petrol Volvo struggled to get much more than 25mpg, and got a ritual thumping when time came to pay the car tax, which was edging up to £300 a year when I cried enough. The Octavia? Its light weight, muscular engine and remarkable gearbox mean it just about matches the Volvo's pace but thrashes it for economy: 3,000 miles in, I'm averaging 46mpg.

And I'm not paying any car tax, either, the Octavia qualifying for zero in its first year, £30 a year after than. Or it did until George Osborne realised new car buyers weren't giving him anything and announced that more "realistic" levels of car tax are on the way.

Anyway, it is a remarkable car. For what's meant to be VW's value brand, it is quiet, refined, well-equipped (climate control, multi-mode gearbox, decent in-car entertainment - they're all there) and screwed together in the way you'd expect for a VW-in-drag. The DSG gearbox is the stand-out performer, and for anyone who's not lived with this twin-clutch marvel the speed and smoothness with which it shifts gears has to be experienced to be believed.

I'm not blind to the stunt VW has pulled here. At eye level, its interior finishes are beautifully restrained and almost upmarket. Below that, where the eye doesn't wander too often, they are hard plastic. Its styling is, of necessity, less striking than a Passat. And I chose a model with the tallest possible tyre profile because the torsion-beam back axle was a cost-saving design choice which means it doesn't soak up bumps the way an Audi does.

I suspect a more sophisticated suspension system would have left even more people wondering why they'd pay a VW price. The key question is how well a value brand stands up to three years of family use. So watch out for the next instalment...

Petrol. Turbo. Automatic. And a bloke who drives like a snail.

How Whitehall's Death Eaters did for the Midland Mainline

As politics go, the decision to “pause” the electrification of the Midland Mainline is miserably, yet predictably, shabby.

It’s pretty obvious the government knew the problems with Network Rail’s budget were going to come to a head before the election. The final announcement last week was also anticipated by a series of leaks which appeared in national newspapers.

Whitehall's grubby paws were all over them. They were softening us up.

All this when millions has already been spent on preparatory work for electrification, and when the government remains committed to pouring billions into London’s transport system and even more fantastical sums into the shimmering vision that is HS2.

But we shouldn’t be surprised. Post-war British history is littered with the wreckage of large-scale, government-funded projects which became victims of the cock-eyed ‘system’ by which we contrive to manage the UK’s creaking infrastructure - its inadequate airports, its slow, overcrowded railways, its stretched power stations and its crappy roads.

While we’re pretty good at producing reports which forecast demand and warn of problems, getting something done about them appears to produce an institutional psychosis which means we never quite manage to get it over the finish line without a financial hiccup. Or we just never manage to get it over the finish line at all.

Actually when I say ‘psychosis’, I mean ‘Treasury’, the government department which looms over anyone in Whitehall who dares suggest money might be spent.

We shouldn’t joke. While infrastructure has its wreckage, politics has its corpses, many of them rendered lifeless by what is the Whitehall equivalent of Harry Potter's Death Eaters.

Yet the decision to kick the Midland Mainline’s electrification into the long grass is surely a glaring example of a dysfunctional system of administration that has had its day.

What should be a rational assessment of the future needs of the economy has been turned into an advert for how not to stimulate regional growth, and how central government spends far too much time listening either to itself or to voices in London.

Those voices don't speak for us.

A couple of weeks ago I was in Nottingham’s twin city, Karlsruhe, riding on a tram which runs straight on to local rail lines and carries on its journey. It has been operating successfully for years and it’s the result of a political system which lets regions keep their money and make their own decisions.

Were it not for the depressing myopia of Whitehall’s economic prison warders, we could do the same in Nottingham.

The social media election that wasn't

So, this was the first social media election, the one where the likes of Twitter and Facebook would play a decisive part in deciding the outcome.

Was it heck.

If we learned one thing about social media during the General Election of 2015, it is that its status as a reflection of the world we live in needs a sizeable health warning.

All the major parties conducted formal and informal social media campaigns, ranging from targeted messages to reoccurring hashtags to Youtube videos.

Judging by the response on Twitter, some people took this very seriously indeed, acting as if their tweets were delivering decisive blows in an election ground-war.

The key phrase there was 'judging by the response'. Towards the end of the campaign, a bar chart appeared from the British Election Study (run by the universities of Nottingham, Manchester and Oxford) which suggested that those who believed Twitter was going to play a big part in the outcome might have got it wrong.

The BES chart showed the levels of social media activity of people who are actually committed to a particular political party - exactly the kind of people, you would have thought, who would be out there posting and tweeting until their fingers went numb. Yet the highest percentage of party supporters who were posting content on Twitter was 14% (for the Welsh nationalist party Plaid Cymru). For Labour, it was was just 5%, for the Tories a paltry 2%.

In other words, a seeming torrent of political activity on Twitter may well have been coming from a comparatively small number of people. It follows that anyone who thought it represented either widespread endorsement or a surge of support was likely to be mistaken.

There were other strange decisions, too. Ed Miliband's appearance in a Youtube video with the comedian and polemicist Russell Brand looked quite smart: he took on someone popular, held his own, and reached a potential audience of 1.4 million followers.

Yet on closer analysis this doesn't seem so clever. Brand is a divisive figure, who people love or loathe, and one with a chequered history. It's quite possible, too, that those who love him are more sympathetic to the left of the political spectrum anyway. And I'd wager that a fair chunk of the people who watch him on Youtube may well be below voting age.

In other words, Ed's Youtube play may not have achieved anything.

This was a difficult election for Labour, one which raises all sorts of questions about its relationship with the electorate. It appeared very active on social media, both officially through MPs and party officials, and unofficially through supporters in the media, the arts and third sector organisations. Did it assume that all this activity represented a level of support and endorsement which we now know wasn't there? In other words, was it talking to itself on social media?

The traditional media complained on more than one occasion that they were being sidelined. At my paper, the Nottingham Post, we endured a pointless encounter with David Cameron while he visited the marginal constituency of Sherwood. His communications team said we could ask him three questions as long as we told them in advance what they were. You just have to play the game in these situations, and make the most of an opportunity to get in front of top politicians. But our time was wasted: we were given enough time with Mr Cameron to ask only one question and his answer contained nothing new. Other regional newspapers up and down the country had similar experiences, and there were those wondering what on earth a party which was ignoring newspapers and doing little on social media was up to.

We have some sense of the answer now. It was fighting a very targeted campaign in particular marginal constituencies and contacting voters directly by phone.

It won. Social media didn't.

My Editor is very fond of telling reporters time and again that "Twitter is not the real world". It isn't irrelevant and can be a very effective way for specific sectors to put across specific messages in a quick and effective way. Business should not ignore it because it's a great amplifier.

But is it an accurate, distortion-free mirror of the lives led by ordinary people? Or a goldfish bowl where a particularly active group of people talk largely to each other?

This may well have been an election in which social media played a part. But one part is all it was, and it may not have been the part some people thought.

Marketing Nottingham: JDI

Delicate, complex, tortuous.

Not exactly the three words you'd choose to sell Nottingham as an inward investment location, but entirely appropriate to characterise the process by which a proper place marketing organisation has emerged.

While the news is now out that Experience Nottinghamshire, Invest in Nottingham and Nottingham Means Business will come together under the umbrella of Marketing Nottingham and Nottinghamshire, the process to nail down the final shape of the organisation is far from complete.

The status of the different organisations means there are all sorts of employment and financial issues to resolve, political sensitivities to accommodate (this is a body that has to visibly serve city and county), and a significant degree of independence to establish.

Achieving that is going to require an experienced, respected, yet firm and forensic pair of hands. Nottingham City Council, which has played the driving role, knows who it would like to chair this process. But a key challenge for the person in the hotseat will be demonstrating to the rest of the county that this isn't going to be some metropolitan fix.

There is also a job to do in convincing politicians and businesses that a body with a very broad portfolio of responsibilities - it takes in everything from bidding for multi-million inward investments to promoting shire B&Bs - can still have a clear focus and a consistent message.

The bigger picture is that this is an organisation which needs to hit the ground running. The marketing of the city and county lags beind that of other major conurbations, and Marketing Nottingham will emerge at a time when the devolution agenda means cities in partcular are sounding an ever-louder drumbeat about their appeal as investment locations.

What's more, both city and county have significant unfulfilled regeneration opportunities - and the clock is ticking loudly on the current economic cycle.

Some close to the process - and many in business - have been more than a little frustrated at the glacial  progress. After all, the need for an organisation which marketed both city and county to businesses and tourists was identified years ago.

But the opportunities it can pursue haven't gone away. And constructing a narrative around them which is flexible enough to serve different purposes really isn't difficult.

Tortuous as this process has been, it's neither here nor there in terms of marketing Nottingham and Nottinghamshire. This is all about the message - and making it happen. JDI, as they say.

MIPIM: Nottingham's Silicon Roundabout is the real deal

The longer you're in business journalism the more sceptical you become about claims that a new development will bring hundreds or thousands of new jobs.

A decade ago, Nottingham was apparently looking at just that when glitzy CGis of a £900m regeneration plan for the city's Eastside area were revealed. What happened? Nothing. The demand just wasn't there and Eastside remains undeveloped to this day.

So what are we to make of claims revealed at MIPIM this week that a £40m Tech Hub in Nottingham could result in hundreds of jobs for people working in and around software development?

I'll declare a vested interest: it was my story and I spoke to the people behind it and others involved in Nottingham's  tech scene several times before publication.

And the difference between the people behind this proposal and the Eastside dream is that they've done this before.

Mark Onyett is the driving force behind it. Armed with a Masters in manufacturing engineering from Cambridge, he went into business consulting before joining Capital One and becoming its director of risk operations. With two former consulting colleagues, he came up with the idea for TDX Group, a business which used data analytics to devise software programs which better manage large-scale debt portfolios.

That was in 2004. In January 2014 he and his fellow shareholders (which by then included Bahrain's Investcorp, no less) sold the Fletcher Gate business to Equifax for a cool £200 million.

Now a partner in London-based tech investment vehicle Blenheim Chalcot (with colleagues Manoj Badale and Charles Mindenhall), he has launched three new tech business in Nottingham which are all operating in the financial services technology space.

The three firms - Oakbrook, Sequensis and Bizfitech - are currently based in York House on Wilford Street and need room to expand. Onyett's idea is that they should form the centre of gravity for a new Tech Hub which will attract other software developers and testers who can feed off each other to develop new ideas and new businesses.

There's nothing new in the economics of clustering - it's what lies behind Silicon Valley on the US West Coast and Silicon Roundabout in London. Onyett's point is that we already have a tech cluster in Nottingham because of the presence of data analytics-based businesses lke Experian, whose growth helped attract Capital One.

Together, those two hefty businesses have supported or given birth to the likes of TDX, Ikano Financial Services, HD Decisions, Insurance Initiatives and others. We have a serious talent pool as a result.

At which point you begin to realise that the announcement Nottingham made at MIPIM this week is not wishful thinking but the real deal.

The one caveat is that the city would do well to market this concept in London, Sheffield, Birmingham and Manchester, as the existing fitech businesses must be close to sucking up all the dev talent already in Nottingham.

Mark Onyett's not alone in thinking that Nottingham has got the rght kind of environment to support the tech mindset. Entrepreneur Adam Bird (one of the founders of Esendex, later sold for £11m) points  to a growing number of social gatherings (NottTuesday, Second Wednesday, for example) and the upcoming Hack Twenty Four event as evidence that there is a tech communty with its own eco system - generally seen as vital if techies are to avoid feeling like they've landed in Nowheresville.

There are other aspects of Nottingham which should appeal. Despite those fitech giants, techies often don't like big, branded and corporate, and environments like the Creative Quarter will go down well.

There were no glitzy CGis of the Nottingham Tech Hub to show at MIPIM (and that's probably a good thing). There is instead an experiened team which wants to tap into an existing talent pool grown by a heritage of data analytics activity.

In other words, it's believable.

MIPIM: The East Midlands Powerhouse

A shot in the arm for Nottingham today as it heads out to MIPIM, the international property development and investment expo in Cannes.

From the UK perspective, the event is likely to be dominated by talk about regional devolution, led of course by the narrative around the so-called Northern Powerhouse - that (theoretical) swathe of economies stretching from Manchester in the West to Leeds in the East.

Manchester and Leeds are big cities and have always had strong economies ever since the days when they became established as great Victorian mercantile centres. They've had powerful politics ever since, and a strong voice in Westminster has ensured that the modern-day Northern Powerhouse  narrative has taken hold.

But here we are on the eve of MIPIM and a new set of statistics confirm - not for the first time - that they're not quite the powerhouse that this narrative implies.

According to business advisors PwC, the fastest growing region outside London and the South East this year will be not the North West or Yorkshire but the East Midlands.

PwC's figures show that our regional economy will grow by 2.5 per cent this year - a percentage point clear of most other regions and two percentage points clear of the North West (which is on 2.3 per cent).

This points to a sustained recovery in our economy, one where the continuing uncertainties around what's happening (or not happening) in the eurozone are being nicely countered by very low inflation and a low oil price.

On that basis, says Paul Norbury, PwC's senior partner in the East Midlands, we should start preparing for a rise in interest rates, probably next year.

Other than a suggestion that house price rises will continue to slow, there's no specific news on property in PwC's outlook.

But it does add a useful element to Nottingham's narrative at MIPIM: Who needs to be a powerhouse when you're the fastest-growing region in the UK?

MIPIM 2015: Property and powerhouses?

In a few days' time, low cost flights from airports across the UK will be full of optimistists. They'll be heading for Nice then hiring a taxi for the short hop up the Cote D'Azure to Cannes. MIPIM here's again.

When I went last year it was, to borrow a phrase from one of the Nottingham team "as if an industry which fell off a cliff in 2008 has just jumped back on again".

The place was teeming with people and money was out there in a big way looking for places to go. A useful chunk of it found its way into the groaning tills of Cannes' bars, restaurants and hotels. Some even made a kebab shop owner smile, but that's another story.

The point last year was that it was obvious that a new investment cycle was underway and that landowners, developers and economic development teams in towns and cities needed to have attractive, oven-ready opportunities for investors.

Nottingham did ok last time round, with a presence more noticeable than it's had for some time. It bagged a restaurant directly opposite the Palais des Festivals, got some decent coverage with a beach cricket event, and won a few friends with a panel discussion dinner and its drinks reception.

This year will be tougher. Cities like Manchester, Liverpool and Leeds, which throw significantly more money at the event than Nottingham, will roll into Cannes on a wave of optimism brought about by regional devolution and the 'Northern Powerhouse' badge.

Now, the statisticians among you might well point out that the economic powerhouse outside London is actually in the Midlands, not the north. But perception is all, the Midlands hasn't (yet) got its message together and London politicians and media will lap up press releses which mention Manchester.

Nottingham will have some highlights to talk about - the enterprise zone centred on the Boots campus is now ready to go; Nottingham City Council is now engaged in a serious push to crack the regeneration of that swathe of the city from Eastside to Waterside; similarly, the city desperately needs new Grade A office space; and the march of its life sciences sector continues apace.

There will be one other significant announcement during MIPIM week. It could have long-term implications for the city. And I'm saying no more than that!

The blog gets back into gear!

For a daily hack this is a shame-faced admission: this blog has been dormant for nearly a year.

May be it's a measure of the way the world's picked up speed in the last 18 months or so, may be it's a reflection of the competing demands of work and family life, but there's been so much other stuff going on that filling a quiet moment with yet more wordsmithery has been the last thing on my mind. I think a few other bloggers have felt the same way.

Enough of the excuses and back to business, for that's what this blog is: a mix of musings on business which don't fit the template of the day job and musings on stuff that I find interesting - my business, if you like.

So we'll get back into gear with some of the latter. Quite literally, infact, as this blog marks a farewell to the trusty old warhorse that is my Volvo. Affectionately known as Kurt (as in Wallander, the Swedish detective), it's the kind of car that conforms to the classic Volvo cliche: a big, lumbering but always dependable V70 estate. Adding further to that veneer of endearing respectability is the fact that it's also a family hand-me-down, having spent the first few years of its life ferrying my wife's aunt and uncle to and from golf clubs in Surrey.

It had got a modest 60,000 miles on the clock when I got my sticky paws on it and dragged it up to Nottinghamshire. It will be traded in a couple of weeks from now with 111,000 on the counter. It's in good nick, so I'd reckon that there's another 100k in it with some careful fettling.

Much as I've enjoyed wafting around in something that's like a pair of old slippers, it's now a car from another era. It's big, heavy, has a large turbo petrol engine and a five-speed automatic slushbox. It's been great for cruising around in...but 200bhp in a heavy car is painfully expensive to run.

How painful? Try this: urban fuel economy is 18 mpg. Car tax is closing in on £300 a year. And its age (first registered in 2001) means it's had to have new hips and kneecaps. I still love it to bits. But it's probably time to pass it on to someone who doesn't do so many miles.

And time for me to take advantage of the huge technical leaps and bounds that have taken place since my V70 first hit the road.

Just how much motoring efficiency has improved can be seen in Kurt's replacement. Its petrol turbo engine is a litre smaller and 60bhp less powerful. The car itself takes up just as much road space as the V70. But its urban fuel economy is more than 46 mpg. Its 134mph top speed is the same as the Volvo. And its emissions are such that in the first year I will hand over no car tax whatsoever to George Osborne, and only £30 a year after that. Whoopee!

That astonishing performance is partly down to the fact that the car is significantly lighter than the Volvo, but also because of a remarkable automatic gearbox known as DSG. This Double Shift Gearbox has seven speeds and not one but two clutches.

In a normal gearbox, the clutch has to disengage itself from one gear and then engage the next, which takes time and uses juice. With the DSG, the first clutch engages one gear, while the second is already lining up the next cog. Shifts happen in milliseconds and the end result is that the auto version of this car is more economical than the manual.

The car also has a few other gizmos which weren't around when my V70 first hit the tarmac. The brakes come on automatically if the car detects an impact, a fatigue sensor sounds if the car spots odd steering inputs, multimedia is controlled via touchscreen, there's even a driving mode selection which allows you to tailor climate control, engine torque, accelerator, power steering and gearbox to suit your own needs. There's also self-parking system on some models.

So, I'm obviously a lucky boy and the posh gods have smiled on me, right? Wrong. One of the biggest changes to have taken place over the past 10-15 years is that some of the badge snobbery that used to decide your pecking order in life's traffic jam has faded, replaced instead by a respect for smart choices.

In other words, this technical marvel is a Skoda.

MIPIM: Has property's party started again?

It'll be one last blast at the bars and cafes in Cannes tonight.

While there'll be some brave souls hanging round for meetings on Friday morning, MIPIM 2014 is more or less over now.

It's been an at times frenetic event, dominated by a sense that there's a lot of investment money chasing too few opportunities.

Adding to the vague sense of desperation, construction firms have been telling anyone who'll listen that they'll run out of brickies and sparks to do all this development within 18 months.

You have to take the hyper atmosphere of MIPIM with a huge pinch of salt. Even so, it's pretty obvious that a new cycle is getting into gear on a serious level. Money is waiting for occupiers to be brave, and planners will need to act fast when proposals land.

Nottingham has almost certainly lined up some deals here, with some sites attracting a number of potential development partners. It's base, La Potiniere in Square Merimee, has had people walking through the door looking for serious conversations. Some won't go anywhere, but both political leader Jon Collins and chief executive Ian Curryer are convinced they are coming away with concrete options.

La Potiniere has been an effective base. Directly opposite the Palais des Festivals, it makes a stand look almost redundant (and don't bother ringing - I'm told Team Nottingham has already snaffled it for next year).

The council has to get results this time round. In the last cycle the CGIs ran well ahead of demand and two key zones, Eastside and Waterside, were left high and dry. Judging by the number of bidders who queued up with millions in their pockets to try to swipe Kevin Riley's troubled Riverside apartments, the demand has already arrived.

Today's announcement that the city council will share the risk with  Peel on 50,000 sq ft of Grade A space near the city's railway station tells you that some regional markets still need a jump-start. Whether the council will actually end up occupying the space depends on whether economic progress is sustained.

But there's a sense now that stalled sites in Nottingham and beyond are about to burst back to life. That or it was a good party...

Thinking big at MIPIM

They don't do things by halves in Russia. Power and presence is everything, and a certain swagger is written all over the presence of Rusia's regions and its capital city, Moscow, at MIPIM.

The Russian regions have their own pavilion, full of bright displays and gleaming models of all sorts of weird and wonderful schemes.

Moscow? Well, Moscow had two things: security on the doors and a model of the city centre which was twice the size of the entire Nottingham and Derby stand.

Directly opposite the regions' pavilion was an old car bearing the Bond movie title 'From Russia With Love'.

As the security on the door demonstrated,that sentiment may not be universally reflected at the moment and certainly not on the Kiev stand inside the main exhibition centre.

And the problem for Russia is that a lot of the considerable sums some of its people have raked in gets invested in the West.

There are some impressive sites in the main exhibition halls too, with quite a few UK cities throwing some serious money at their presence (and not just Birmingham and Manchester).

This is an 'upwards cycle' MIPIM where the professionals and the places they advise know there is some serious investment wodge out there - Colliers estimated this morning that another 60 billion euros of pension and insurance fund money will try to find a home this year.

Sounds big, but it's just under a third more than the total value of UK property investment last year.

UK cities are working hard to get some of this money coming in their direction and as I blogged yesterday they need to move reasonably fast. Competition means investors can be choosy, and the construction industry they need to get spades in the ground is short of capacity to make things happen - one building firm I spoke to here has got more than two-thirds of its 2015 budget in the bag already.

Nottingham has some big, logical oppportunities it is marketing at MIPIM. it needs to get Bob theBuilder  signed up to make them happen.

MIPIM 2014: No presence, no deals

MIPIM 2014 starts today, Tuesday 11 March 2014.

And if you're an ambitious city or town all you need to know is this: if you're not already here, forget this economic cycle.

Why? As far as property investment is concerned, the downturn is over. The issue now is where to invest for the upturn, which is a question of where are the best opportunities to make money and which local authorities can best help us deliver that?

That much was obvious from an afternoon in Cafe Roma, the bistro directly outside the Palais des Festivals in Cannes which is a bellwether for where the market's at when MIPIM is on. MIPIM starts on Tuesday, but on Monday Cafe Roma was absolutely rammed with people talking business.

When I went for an illicit wander round the half-finished stands yesterday it was obvious that the big cities have already realised they need to make a big noise at MIPIM 2014. Manchester and Birmingham have thrown six-figure sums at their presence.

Nottingham looks likely to punch above its weight as one of the smaller Core Cities. It's base, a bistro called La Potiniere, is directly opposite the Palais des Festivals in eye sight of anyone going in. It's programme is different enough to attract attention.

The proof of the pudding will come in the next couple of years when we find out if big developers have taken a bite of the city's big opportunities.

This is a big week for Cafe Roma and La Potiniere. And it's a massive one for Nottinghsm.

MIPIM 2014

So, it's MIPIM week again.

The event doesn't officially kick off until Tuesday but 'advance' parties are already here sweating their way through a warm Sunday to prepare stands, cafes, restaurants, meeting rooms and apartments where countries, regions, cities and even some towns from all over Europe will try to persuade investors and developers to come and do the bricks and mortar thing.

Nottingham is among them, and while the banner is out above its headquarters (a small, but very well-placed cafe) it doesn't formally launch its programme until Tuesday morning with a day-long programme which takes in national media, private meetings, formal events and a dinner for invited guests.

That's just day one.

Even though day one is two days hence, I've already seen several people from city businesses trying to get meetings fixed up.

That is what MIPIM is really about. It's the largest gathering of the most influential investors, developers and property and construction professionals in Europe and the object is to simply get in front of them and persuade them yours is the place where they can best turn a profit.

Some of these people are extremely wealthy - the high net worth individuals of the world, and they'll be flying in by private jet (I was on a rammed easyjet flight, thanks). Some of them are professionals and directors from comparatvely small architecture, building engineering, consultancy and development businesses who need to make this event pay its way because they foot their own bills.

While they are weary of the booze-and-bling image associated with a conference next to the Med, they take the hgh-life accusations with a pinch of salt. The business opportunities here are too good to pass up.

It's harder for councillors and council officials, who are spending public money being here. Their presence is usually fleeting, on a budget and the fear of being seen within 50 feet of a Bentley or a boat haunts every photo opportunity.

In Nottingham's case, they've reached the conclusion that envious mudslinging is something they'll have to live with. The city's just had a fortune spend on infrastructure, some serious money is about to be spent on its two main shopping centres, and it has ambitions to get sites which stalled when the credit crunch hit back up and running.

The property industry is now back at the start of an investment cycle, and the consensus is that a wall of foreign money has made it too expensive for UK-based property investors to make money in London.

Hence the regions are now trying hard to persuade these investors - be they professional property investors or pension funds - that provincial cities are the next best bet.

Plenty of other UK towns and cities are here. For Nottingham - with an infrastructre some choked cities would die for - giving MIPIM a miss makes no sense.

The Man Who Got Things Done

There are a lot of people who knew Jim Taylor better than me. There are a lot of people who have paid tribute more eloquently than I can. I was first introduced to JT by Richard Tresidder, whose own appreciation in the Nottingham Post neatly summed up his talent, his determination and his refusal to allow a long-term health problem to get in the way of either driving Nottingham forwards or making mirth.

Richard Williams, in The Guardian, rightly brought the passing of a great provincial planner to national attention, while Tim Garratt shared those inimitable 'Jim-isms' in his blog.

Today we said goodbye to Jim. What such a notoriously publicity-shy character would have made of a St Mary's Church packed to the rafters, of poignant memories, warm tributes and gales of laughter, I don't know.

The humour I'm sure he would have appreciated. The formality would have been something to be mercilessly sent up.

He did that to me on more than one occasion. I picked his brain on many stories about regeneration and economic development, and liked to think the odd one might have contained a few grains of insight. JT had a way of letting you know when they didnt. On the morning one of my more epic efforts was published - an epic whch quoted a particular individual at length - the phone rang. The caller didn't say who he was, but the nature of the charming put-down needed no introduction. "I see you've been drinking deeply from the pipette of his wisdom again," he chuckled.

The gentle de-construction which followed made it clear that this particular epic had all the substance of tomorrow's chip-paper.

Jim could, of course, see the bigger picture in a way that a mere hack couldn't. Along with numerous other victims, he would summon me for coffee and begin with something along the lines of "I want to discuss something - and I can see the headlines now". At that point, I'd realise I was in for several weeks of toil at the hands of a man far more exact and demanding than any editor I've come across.

Jim's energy (hinted at by Eddie Neale in a warm eulogy) could be both demanding and infectious. He was intolerant of people who were either uncommitted or in it for something other than the greater good.

Meeting his standards was not easy (and will be harder still with his passing). It required you to set aside sectional interest and see that bigger picture. Feathers would be ruffled, risks would be taken. And things would be achieved.

The tram (his personal train set, as Geoff Williams, from the Sneinton 'Academy' put it) should shield the city from some of the long-term costs of traffic congestion. The Market Square is a provincial jewel. The rejuvenation of the Forest Recreation Ground righted a wrong.

The work that Jim put into Nottingham Ambassadors and - in particular - the Invest in Nottingham Club - should not be under-estimated, either. In a city where mutual suspicion between public sector and private sector has got in the way of progress, the Club has provided some crucial economic development glue at a critical time.

Jim's abiliy to empathise with other people's problems was, perhaps, a mirror of his own sensitivities. But his unvarnished commitment to doing right by Nottingham meant he was entitled to be sensitive. You cannot argue with his achievements, and nor should you - like him, they are there to be celebrated.

Nottingham is a better place because of Jim Taylor. Lives have been enriched by him, as Eddie Neale said. Pomposity has been punctured, mischief has been made, riotous fun has been had. And progress has been made.

Summing Jim up in one sentence is not easy. As his sons put it at the end of today's celebration: "He was the man who got things done."

Has the rug really been pulled from under Mark Carney?

The heated debate about whether or not Bank of England Governor Mark Carney has engaged in a humiliating climbdown over his forward guidance on interest rates is destined to sink beneath the waves of flooding news.

Which is probably not a bad thing.

The debate is an important one, but was being turned into an egotistical contest about who knew most about UK monetary policy: a Canadian bank governor or City scribblers.

The scribblers appear to have decided long ago that Carney was an outsider who'd blundered. After all, what on earth was this suspiciously slick Canadian doing making his first major announcement about policy in Nottingham of all places?

This was where, last August, he said the Bank wouldn't even consider putting up interest rates until the unemployment rate fell to 7%.

This was breaking new ground on two fronts. First, it meant the Bank was no longer tied by inflation – it had another factor to consider. Second, Mr Carney was a whole lot more open about what he meant (finding meaning in an interview with Mervyn King, his predecessor, was like searching for a needle in a haystack).

Mr Carney's view was that the Bank needed to lose its lofty air, get out into the economy and explain to worried consumers and uncertain businesses that it wasn't going to do anything which would torpedo a fragile recovery they would depend on for jobs, wages and revenue.

If you look back, you'll see that he dropped plenty of hints to suggest that seven per cent was far from an automatic threshold. It was, he said in an interview with the Nottingham Post, "only a staging post" and "No one should assume that it is a trigger for raising rates".

He also made another important point, one with which few would disagree: that the Bank's decision on interest rates would not be dominated by the strength of the economy in London and the South East, which is on a different level to the rest of the country.

Remember his comment: "Nottingham is the bellwether of the broader British economy. It is not over-weighted with finance, we get enough of that perspective in London."

This is one the City scribblers would do well to dwell on. Mr Carney may have been caught out by the speed with which the unemployment rate has plunged close to a 7% national average. But it remains significantly above that level in some regions, the recovery that is clearly motoring ahead in the South East remains patchy elsewhere.

Similarly, the debts that lie underneath many households (and some businesses)haven't miraculously disappeared.

Confidence is coming back, for sure, and the Bank's new GDP growth forecast for this year – north of 3% - signals real momentum.

But don't get lost in debates about whether the precise nature of Mr Carney's forward guidance was right or wrong.

Economists are now expecting the first rate rise to take place in Spring 2015, with the base rate having risen to a forecast 2% by 2017.

Whatever technical changes have taken place, Mark Carney's most telling comment in Nottingham was – and remains – this: "As you see things picking up, don't worry that the rug is going to be pulled out from under you too soon."

Is the number up for Northern cities?

A FEW weeks ago The Economist magazine took the brave step of suggesting that some northern towns and cities were in such dire straits we should abandon them and bus residents elsewhere.

Well, it didn't put it quite like that, but its analysis of the way places like Middlesbrough, Burnley, Hartlepool and Hull absorbed huge sums of public money without their economies making progress was put forward as a reason for switching the money to more promising locations and providing transport links to their jobs.

The Economist's article was a clinical analysis of some unpleasant facts: unemployment rates in these towns are double the national average, young people are draining away and their high streets are "thick with betting shops and payday lenders, if they are not empty."

In other words, their economies are no longer working in a sustainable way.

It pointed out that fortunes have been lavished on regenerating them when the economy was booming, often on "grand projects" which could not survive without life support from the taxpayer. That life support has gone, and The Economist's conclusion was that Government money should focus on helping people rather than propping up places.

How? "That means helping them to commute or move to places where there are jobs – and giving them the skills to get those jobs."

There were some predictable outpourings of rage. Some of it was genuine pride in cultural identity, some of it was political bluster from people who probably have a few questions to answer (the most serious implication of The Economist's analysis was that giving businesses and people incentives to come and set up in these towns is propping up local politics, not local economics, and diverting business from places where it might be more successful).

Hull's response was cleverer than that. And it'll interest Nottingham.

Academics from the city's university pointed out that the 'facts' about Hull that The Economist's analysis was based on weren't accurate because they were based on a political boundary not economic reality. In other words, it had missed Hull's affluent suburbs.

Sound familiar? Nottingham has struggled in numerous rankings for exactly the same reason. In business, we know the city as capital of the East Midlands, one of England's eight core cities and a pretty attractive location which mixes big business, entrepreneurial vitality, academia of international standing, an attractive lifestyle and some beautiful places to live.

Yet the official statistics about poverty, health and education make for a miserable roll-call of below average readings. Why? Once again, because the data is taken from a tightly-drawn inner city political boundary – not the functioning social and economic entity that includes the likes of West Bridgford, Wollaton, Arnold and Mapperley.

The traditional response is that these local government boundaries should therefore be changed. This raises all sorts of political issues (not least self-interest) and seems unlikely to happen anytime soon.

In any case, there's a cheaper and quicker way of doing it – simply adopt the methodology used in the University of Hull's (miserably-titled) "index of multiple deprivation". It looks at all the relevant measures in a series of concentric circles from the inside of a city to the outside, reflecting the way a city functions rather than its politics.

As The Economist points out, cities and their conurbations don't always form neat circles so the index isn't infallible. Nor should such measures be used to suggest that things are OK on average when festering problems remain unsolved. 'Inner' Nottingham's education issues are serious and need serious attention.

But they need to be seen in context. There is clearly no need to hop on a bus and abandon Nottingham - quite the reverse, in fact. The numbers about the city need to make that abundantly clear.

RBS, GRG and the reasons why small firms couldn't borrow

TWO reports about banking have emerged blinking into the daylight in the past few days and neither makes for pretty reading.

One is entrepreneur Lawrence Tomlinson’s sorry tale about the way a restructuring division of Royal Bank of Scotland, known as GRG, allegedly elbowed viable businesses down a slippery slope into failure which ended with another bank subsidiary, West Register, making a tidy profit on the sale of property assets.

Quite rightly, this grubby episode is now under investigation, and one of the cases the probe would do well to dwell on is the way Kevin Riley’s River Crescent apartment development on the banks of the Trent in Nottingham ended up in administration.

Despite the lurid headlines, it’s actually the other report which matters more. Sir Andrew Large’s ‘RBS Independent Lending Review’ looks at RBS’s lending to SMEs before and after the credit crunch and goes a long way towards explaining why small firms have found it hard to get finance since 2008.

RBS/NatWest isn’t the only bank in the SME lending market and I suspect others will have had similar issues. But it is the biggest player and the failings outlined by Sir Andrew lift the lid on why the problem has occurred.

There isn’t room to cover all the findings of a 36-page report here, but it’s worth dwelling on some of the detail.

For starters, it’s important to understand that lending to small firms shouldn’t go back to pre-crisis proportions for two reasons.

One is that before the crisis they were given too much money. It’s now estimated that by 2009 UK banks in total had loaned as much as £30 billion more than the sector was really capable of repaying – a situation which has now been thrown into reverse, with as much as £35 billion too little since.

In between the two lies what should be a prudent level of SME lending – a total stock of bank lending of around £200-210 billion.

The reason why lending ballooned out of control in the run up to the crunch lies in lax lending policies. In some cases, RBS agreed loans not because of a borrower’s trading performance but because the business owned collateral in the form of a property asset which was rising in value. On that basis, many loans were doomed to failure.

Even after the credit crunch hit and the bank ran into trouble, it didn’t pull the shutters down. In 2009 it had budgeted for a substantial amount of SME lending – but it couldn’t get the money out of the door because of a mix of its own turmoil and an economy which was in no fit state to absorb it.

Unsurprisingly, RBS has since taken some fairly drastic action to try to repair both its balance sheet and the way it operates lending. What may surprise us that some of this drastic action appears astonishingly basic.

RBS acknowledges that in the run-up to the crunch it had casually waved goodbye to experienced relationship managers which hindsight demonstrates it sorely needed. While some wise heads remained, others were ill-equipped to understand businesses or industry sectors and driven by incentives which skewed the decision-making process.

So, RBS has since introduced a training and accreditation programme for relationship managers, including a professional qualification.  But didn’t it have one before?

Similarly, it’s changed the lending criteria, the process for very small businesses beginning with a basic affordability test followed by the kind of credit scoring that routinely goes into a personal loan. For bigger customers the relationship manager can make some delegated decisions, but those that fail his scorecard criteria or go beyond his financial authority are referred to a credit officer who puts smaller, straightforward applications through a data template or bigger, complex ones through a bespoke process.

Finally, its commercial banking operation now includes people with specialist knowledge of certain industry sectors. Again, why on earth wasn’t this standard practice anyway?

Sir Andrew’s report makes clear that since the credit crunch RBS appears to have sorted out all its internal problems. The problem, though, is that this hasn’t translated into more lending – and surveys show that up to a third of SMEs think the bank still isn’t open for business.

When you realise that as recently as last year RBS’s own staff ranked lending a distant third in their list of priorities (well behind getting deposits and protecting against risk) that doesn’t come as a great surprise.

That’s not the only hurdle still standing in the way of a proper level of prudent lending to small firms by RBS

As that pendulum swing in total bank lending to SMEs shows, relationship managers and credit officers have become too risk averse, turning down applications which Sir Andrew says they should be approving.

Worse, the bank’s whole approach to business and commercial lending is split between different divisions and different teams with different objectives.

This goes beyond the fact that some of the people who deal with business most often are not business bankers but retail banking staff. It is where the whole Global Restructuring Group controversy raises its very ugly head.

GRG is meant to manage the bank’s relationship with business and commercial customers whose businesses have hit trouble. But Sir Andrew’s report shows that it is a standalone entity, a profit centre in its own right, and that even the bank’s own business and commercial divisions couldn’t see what was happening to customers who disappeared into it.

The ugly mess which surfaced in the Sunday Times is the end result: it still smacks of the practices of the Fred Goodwin era where the bank’s  profit chasing got out of kilter with the economy and customer need

Sir Andrew’s report suggests that these messes are largely history and that the bank is in much better shape to deliver the service it always should have done – prudent, well-informed lending which made the most of market opportunities.

The problem is that many SMEs just can’t see that yet, and Sir Andrew almost seems puzzled as to why that’s happened.

I’ll give him a clue, here: another one of RBS/NatWest’s post crunch blunders was in waving goodbye to seasoned communications officers working in the regions – trusted people who knew how to get a message across.

It still hasn’t repaired that damage. When I spoke to the bank yesterday about its treatment of Kevin Riley in Nottingham the response came in the form of a statement from Edinburgh. And its two ‘regional’ communications people are based in London.

RBS is a bank which became too big and too centralised in its outlook, property-based profit chasing leaving it blind to a boatload of trouble. Now, it’s probably in a much better position to lend well and deliver more valuable relationships to SME businesses.

Here’s hoping it doesn’t turn into a distant giant again.

HS2's timetable troubles

Has HS2 suddenly hit the buffers?

Some of its opponents might be suggesting that today after a report from the National Audit Office basically said Government hasn't made a very strong case for it.

But if you read the report (as I have) you'll realise that its heavily nuanced language does not say that the case cannot be made. Rather, it says it needs to be made clearer.

So the NAO is really saying that the case for HS2 is not clear...yet.

Nevertheless, its analysis of the Government's work on HS2 so far has plenty of ammo for opponents.

The cost-benefit analysis is poor because it contained errors, the business case is built partly on data which is in some cases more than 10 years out of date.

Then there's the small matter of an apparent £3bn funding gap in the first phase, and a challenging timetable for that first phase to actually get going.

Civil service insiders will tell you it's a must-do-better warning shot rather than a damning verdict. The money almost certainly can be found and ministers were already revising their case for HS2 when the NAO was drawing up its report.

Neverthless, the NAO's report reads like an analysis of a hard-pressed government department trying to push through an enormously complicated project to a tight timetable when it's short of expertise. The big risk there is that expensive mistakes are made (remember the West Coast franchise fiasco?).

What about Nottingham, which is hoping to benefit from an HS2 station at Toton in stage 2 of this £30bn project? The positive is that the NAO believes the economic benefits of the second stage should be much stronger than the first stage.

But if its warnings about the first stage timetable are proved accurate our long wait for that second stage may be longer still.

Westminster fiddles while the economy burns?

I suspect that George Cowcher, the chief executive of Derbyshire & Nottinghamshire Chamber, is probably being his normal diplomatic self when he says that Conservative party politicking about an EU referendum is “extremely unhelpful”.
While it’s true to say that businesses are unlikely to shed any tears if there was a bonfire of EU red tape tomorrow, Britain’s relationship with the Union is currently number 99 on the list of the top 10 challenges they face.
Businesses really do get riled by the time and money it takes to satisfy rules simply to get the job done (especially when the EU is meant to be a barriers-down single market), but what they crave more than anything else is stability: if we know what the rules are and they’re the same for everyone then they’ll usually grin and bear them.
The spectacle of politicians down in London spending OUR time and money jawing about an EU referendum might well strike businesses as not just indulgent but also irrelevant to where the economy is at right now.
What about business rates revaluation, what about energy and raw material costs, what about infrastructure, what about the availability of funding and the cost of new facilities, what about sorting UK government red tape?
Derbyshire & Nottinghamshire Chamber is the third biggest in the country, so the views of the businesses who comprise its membership ought to count for something.
Those views, expressed through its respected Quarterly Economic Survey, are that two-thirds of businesses want the UK to stay in the EU. What they want to change is the UK taking more control over some of the one-size-fits-all rules governing issues like employment.
The EU is not good at persuading ordinary people of its value, and has recently had a nasty habit of asking the same question a different way when people give it an answer it doesn’t like. As an institution, it has seemed both wrong-footed and lead-footed amidst the Eurozone crisis – a crisis that has had a painful impact on ordinary people in Greece and Spain.
Not being part of the eurozone has unquestionably helped the UK’s sluggish economy, allowing us to manipulate both interest rates and currency value in a way individual Eurozone countries cannot.
But businesses largely believe being a part of the wider EU at worst doesn’t make any difference, at best has its merits. If the Chamber’s survey is anything to go by, it’s the rules they quibble over, not club membership.

A mile wide, an inch deep

The Boston Marathon bombing was a shocking event.
But what happened afterwards on social media was just as disturbing in its own way.
For professional reasons I had to keep an eye on the unfolding drama, among other things following the Twitter hashtag #bostonmarathon.
The Tweets which poured out combined grief, fear and almost a sense of collective panic mixed with a desire for revenge.
Fear and revenge can be a poisonous mixture, though. Put that together with some amateurishly inept web-only news sources and you had a situation where innocents were identified as suspects and police and the FBI were being bombarded with useless information.
We now know from a solid piece of reporting by the Washington Post, among others, that this at the very least complicated the investigation - and that the eventual decision to release images of the two prime suspects was taken partly in order to prevent any more innocents being fingered.
There was worse. Shocking images of the bomb victims were tweeted (sometimes with 'ooh, this is awful' comments), while at the end a gruesome photograph of one of the suspects was tweeted after his death.
This wasn't social media's finest hour.
Thanks to the web, I routinely read a few foreign newspapers these days, among them the Washington Post and the Sydney Morning Herald.
The Washington Post carried a forensically detailed account of the Boston bombing investigation which lifted the lid on the impact social media had on the work of the police and the FBI. The Post's reporting also told the story in an authoritative depth which social media hasn't come close to.
The same day, the Sydney Morning Herald carried a story about the habits of young people and social media, highlighting a tendency to sample lots but look into little.
In short, it suggested they live their lives "a mile wide, an inch deep".
Which pretty much summed up what social media did with the Boston bombing.

HS2: Why the race is on for Nottingham

HS2 sounds like a fabulous opportunity for Nottingham. But we also have to recognise that it’s a potentially significant competitive threat.
So may be the fact that it’s 20 years away is not necessarily a bad thing.
Examining the route it will take tells you three things: that the project is almost certain to run into opposition from people whose properties are likely to be bulldozed out of the way, and that it is an extremely ambitious civil engineering project.
In the East Midlands alone, the route tunnels directly underneath the runway at East Midlands Airport, under the M1 at two points, over rivers, through residential areas.
The third thing? If it stays anywhere near on budget I’d be amazed.
But the challenge. Being 51 minutes from London, just over 20 from Birmingham and a similar sprint to Leeds sounds like a major opportunity. And that’s the way it should be seen – an opportunity to get across the benefits of Nottingham to cities and conurbations suffering the economic and social pressures of crowding and expense.
And the benefits of Greater Nottingham and beyond and as a business and leisure destination: brilliant transport infrastructure, an international centre for life sciences research, a global centre for data analytics expertise, what should by then be a burgeoning digital/creative quarter, a thriving enterprise zone, clean technology expertise, and proximity to the high-tech engineering giant that is Derby.
HS2 could solve staffing problems for some of our indigenous businesses, too, putting them in touch with a wider pool of talent.
But HS2 also means the pressure is on Nottingham yet again to get itself into an attractive shape as a place to live and thrive – great shopping and leisure, first-rate visitor attractions, high-quality schools, a clean and safe environment.
We need that major retail development to happen so that Broadmarsh gets tidied up and the Victoria Centre modernised. We need to make the most of the castle and Robin Hood. And what about a Museum of east Midlands Industry somehwere between Nottingham and Derby (may be nearer Derby, because of a heritage that stretches from Arkwright to the best jet engines in the world)?
Much has been achieved here over the years. But HS2 means we will be compared with bigger, better places and raises the bar.
It isn’t just a train that’s barrelling down that high-speed line. It’s a big challenge.