So, here we are toiling away in the midst of recession. Low growth, high costs and to cap it all summer’s been rained off. Dreary doesn’t even come close.
Don’t you just wish you were somewhere that had prospects?
Fantasise for a minute – just imagine what business would be like if you were in a place where someone was spending a bit of money - £500m here, £140m there, with the odd £60m thrown in somewhere else.
In this climate? You are having a laugh...
Well, if you still think that’s fantasy land, the joke’s on you: it’s actually Nottingham. Now.
The £500m is the vast civil engineering project that will turn the one-line tram into a fully-fledged three-line network. It’s underway now.
The £140m is the [scandalously overdue] scheme to turn Nottingham’s southern link to the M1, East Midlands Airport and the East Midlands Parkway railway station into a fast dual carriageway. It starts in January.
The £60m? Well, it’s actually £120m – one £60m sum is earmarked for the transformation of Nottingham Railway Station into a transport interchange connecting rail, road and tram, the other £60m is the combined sum Nottingham can lever to deliver the schemes which comprise a Government-approved City Deal programme.
So let’s just tot all that spending up for a minute: that’s £760 million of confirmed investment in your city. When Capital Shopping Centres finally get round to revamping Broadmarsh and the Vic Centre (2014, according to an analysis last month) it will take that figure up to around £1 billion.
One. Billion. Pounds.
Doesn’t seem quite so dreary out there now, does it? At least I hope it doesn’t – and this is the point: I’m really not sure people have woken up to what’s about to happen here.
Okay, it won’t happen overnight. Large-scale schemes take large-scale planning and the wheels of an advanced, mature democracy turn irritatingly slowly (particularly in Whitehall, currently way out in the lead for the ‘Plain Useless at Getting the Money Out’ prize).
But these projects will create jobs before, during and after they are completed.
The infrastructure investments offer the prospect of turning Nottingham into one of the best business locations in Britain for connecting commerce, customers and workforce.
In some ways it’s the City Deal and the Growth Plan which supports it that offers the most tantalising prospect, because it provides an answer to a big question: Where does Nottingham’s economy go from here?
The slow decline of traditional manufacturing here meant the city didn’t suffer an economic shock. But this slow transition left it far too dependent on the service sector/public sector, which together accounts for more than 80% of jobs.
You can’t grow business services when business isn’t growing and the public sector is actually contracting. So we have to grow in a new direction.
We already have some established traction in life sciences which was present through Boots’ old drug discovery activities, has been continued in university R&D programmes, and is being commercialised on a substantial scale at BioCity.
There are substantial research activities, too, in sustainable environmental technologies and a kernel of promising ‘clean tech’ businesses.
There are also clusters of coders and programmers in this city, working in fields ranging from advanced, niche data analytics through to the production of blockbusting computer games. Digital content, they call it.
So, massive investment, promising new industries. What’s the missing link?
There are a three of them, actually.
One is an education system which manufactures the raw material these and other businesses need – skilled, well-qualified kids who leave schools and colleges with attributes which satisfy employers, rather than the insanity of a system which allows kids to pick dud subjects which satisfy nothing other than a meaningless educational KPI.
The second is encouraging enterprise through meaningful advice from people who’ve done it. Formal training goes only so far – wise words from people who’ve tasted failure to find success counts for much more.
Finally, Nottingham’s massive potential should be supported by a big, bold message. We have a story to tell about big things that are going to happen and major opportunities that will emerge.
Have we just bought ourselves a new future? You decide.
Showing posts with label A453. Show all posts
Showing posts with label A453. Show all posts
Monday, 16 July 2012
Wednesday, 30 November 2011
When the A453 speeds up, so will the economy
The reporting of the Chancellor’s Autumn Statement (that’s the mini Budget he said he was getting rid of) has been almost ritually gloomy
Growth worse than forecast, borrowing worse than forecast, cuts worse than forecast, unemployment worse than forecast (that’s enough worse than forecast – ed.)
There are a couple of reasons for the headline gloom-fest. For starters, this is not what George Osborne said would happen, and it lands him in a suspiciously similar position to his political opponent, Nottingham High School old boy Ed Balls. So some would say he is properly being held to account, others that it’s political schadenfreude.
The second reason is that we appear to have a fixation with news agendas:
“I think it’s grim, what do you think?”
“Well, yeah – it does sound grim, doesn’t it?”
“Terrible, pretty grim really.”
Now, it would be a brave person to stand up and suggest anaemic UK growth and the euro zone horror story signal that happy days are here again.
But I’ll try to dial in a little bit of perspective.
Besides a potential hiccup in this quarter and the next (that’s the R-word or the Double-D phrase), the economy is likely to grow a little bit over the next year.
As that’s a national average, some regions of the UK are likely to grow more than others.
The East Midlands looks like it’ll be one of them.
I says that because I saw a piece of research towards the end of last week from the Institute for Public Policy Research which analysed when employment in the regions was likely to get back up to its pre-recession peak.
Some of its research does sound, ahem, grim. Northern regions may not see employment peak again until 2018 or beyond. That’s a lost decade.
But other regions will see it return to the high by 2014. And we’re bracketed together with the south, south east and east of England in this group.
One more point of perspective. Whether it was courage, confrontation or carelessness, the Chancellor chose the day before the public sector pensions strike to announce that these workers could also look forward to pegged pay increases and more job losses.
In total, the Office for Budgetary Responsibility is now estimating that more than 710,000 public sector workers will have lost their jobs by 2017.
In isolation, that’s a huge number. But, as I’ve blogged before, it is a proportionally small part of the economy – of the UK workforce of 30 odd million, 6 million are employed in the public sector. So the job losses would amount to less than 2.5% of our total workforce, and over that length of time at least some of those jobs will be replaced by private sector growth (not as many as George Osborne would hope, though).
Besides the raft of measures aimed at encouraging lending to small and medium-sized businesses, the major headline for us was that we finally appear to have dragged the A453 widening project over the line.
After only 30 years of trying...
This single carriageway link between Nottingham, the M1, East Midlands Airport and the East Midlands Parkway railway station has accurately been described as the biggest car park in Nottingham.
Beyond the jokes, it has cost the local economy millions in delays, and Boots dropped some heavy hints in private that it regarded progress on this project as a factor in future investment – especially after the decision to turn part of its sprawling and under-utilised campus into an enterprise zone.
While we don’t have a definite start date, that project will now begin before 2015, which is earlier than expected. Turning it into a four-lane road should reduce congestion and cut journey times.
More significantly, it is also likely to open up swathes of land for residential and commercial development, and I wouldn’t be in the least bit surprised to see land transactions and planning applications start to shift in this area.
We can’t kid ourselves – it’s going to be slow progress for a while now. We could well have a situation where, when the A453 finally speeds up, so does the economy.
Growth worse than forecast, borrowing worse than forecast, cuts worse than forecast, unemployment worse than forecast (that’s enough worse than forecast – ed.)
There are a couple of reasons for the headline gloom-fest. For starters, this is not what George Osborne said would happen, and it lands him in a suspiciously similar position to his political opponent, Nottingham High School old boy Ed Balls. So some would say he is properly being held to account, others that it’s political schadenfreude.
The second reason is that we appear to have a fixation with news agendas:
“I think it’s grim, what do you think?”
“Well, yeah – it does sound grim, doesn’t it?”
“Terrible, pretty grim really.”
Now, it would be a brave person to stand up and suggest anaemic UK growth and the euro zone horror story signal that happy days are here again.
But I’ll try to dial in a little bit of perspective.
Besides a potential hiccup in this quarter and the next (that’s the R-word or the Double-D phrase), the economy is likely to grow a little bit over the next year.
As that’s a national average, some regions of the UK are likely to grow more than others.
The East Midlands looks like it’ll be one of them.
I says that because I saw a piece of research towards the end of last week from the Institute for Public Policy Research which analysed when employment in the regions was likely to get back up to its pre-recession peak.
Some of its research does sound, ahem, grim. Northern regions may not see employment peak again until 2018 or beyond. That’s a lost decade.
But other regions will see it return to the high by 2014. And we’re bracketed together with the south, south east and east of England in this group.
One more point of perspective. Whether it was courage, confrontation or carelessness, the Chancellor chose the day before the public sector pensions strike to announce that these workers could also look forward to pegged pay increases and more job losses.
In total, the Office for Budgetary Responsibility is now estimating that more than 710,000 public sector workers will have lost their jobs by 2017.
In isolation, that’s a huge number. But, as I’ve blogged before, it is a proportionally small part of the economy – of the UK workforce of 30 odd million, 6 million are employed in the public sector. So the job losses would amount to less than 2.5% of our total workforce, and over that length of time at least some of those jobs will be replaced by private sector growth (not as many as George Osborne would hope, though).
Besides the raft of measures aimed at encouraging lending to small and medium-sized businesses, the major headline for us was that we finally appear to have dragged the A453 widening project over the line.
After only 30 years of trying...
This single carriageway link between Nottingham, the M1, East Midlands Airport and the East Midlands Parkway railway station has accurately been described as the biggest car park in Nottingham.
Beyond the jokes, it has cost the local economy millions in delays, and Boots dropped some heavy hints in private that it regarded progress on this project as a factor in future investment – especially after the decision to turn part of its sprawling and under-utilised campus into an enterprise zone.
While we don’t have a definite start date, that project will now begin before 2015, which is earlier than expected. Turning it into a four-lane road should reduce congestion and cut journey times.
More significantly, it is also likely to open up swathes of land for residential and commercial development, and I wouldn’t be in the least bit surprised to see land transactions and planning applications start to shift in this area.
We can’t kid ourselves – it’s going to be slow progress for a while now. We could well have a situation where, when the A453 finally speeds up, so does the economy.
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