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...

Elected Mayors:Campaign hits a low

Nottingham Labour looks to have shot itself in the foot with its latest attempt to persuade city residents to vote against having a directly elected mayor.
While the party nationally actually has official candidates in some cities where an elected mayor has already been signed off, the branch in Nottingham has set its face against even the concept of one.
And not by half.
It has variously suggested that an elected mayor would cost £1million, would struggle to work with the city council, and might even be easily corrupted. For good measure, it’s slung a bit of mud at the yes campaign by questioning not what it’s said but who is paying for it.
Even supporters of the current leadership have privately expressed disappointment at the no campaign's failure to sketch out the existing system’s successes or an alternative vision for moving the city forwards.
Some of those concerns have now come out into the open in the wake of the appearance of leaflets bearing Nottingham Labour's imprint which critics claim are naked scare tactics.
The leaflets claim that having an election for a mayor risks allowing far right organizations like the BNP or English Defence League take power in Nottingham. But they don’t use quite so many words. One leaflet says: ‘Racists Want a £1m Extra Mayor!’. So that’s telling you...
The BBC says some of those leaflets have been distributed near mosques. While they are clearly from Nottingham Labour they don't bear the details of a named publisher, which is naughty under electoral law.
The likelihood of the BNP winning a mayoral vote in Nottingham is somewhere close to hell freezing over on the probability scale. And the EDL couldn't actually field a candidate because it isn't a political party.
So what is Nottingham Labour’s no campaign up to?
City council leader Jon Collins says it's irresponsible not to point out the risks attached to a mayoral vote. But these supposed risks would surely affect everyone - why point them out only to certain communities?
The reaction among some of Labour's own party members and supporters has been one of contempt. Writing on the left-leaning website Labour List, Jo Tanner, the national director of a Labour yes campaign, said such scare tactics were “not what I expect from the Labour party I joined”.
She went on: “I could talk about the breach of election law which demands that materials should feature an imprint by a named person. I could talk about the total distortion of the facts, that in 2011 the BNP received 760 votes [in Nottingham] compared to the Labour Party’s 112,325.
“For me, though, it is the impression this sends to the people of Nottingham – and beyond – of the Labour Party, of the depths to which some of our number will sink.”
The tone of Jon Collins’ response on Labour List suggests he realises there is a case to answer, but – despite Jo Tanner’s emphatic statistical evidence – he insists the risk is real.
I don't know who sanctioned these leaflets or what process concluded they were an appropriate tactic. But they risk being seen as an aggressive and distasteful attempt to exploit fear among some communities. Whatever the result, it's unlikely these leaflets will be forgotten.
They are, though, consistent with a no campaign which has made a series of controversially negative claims, and appears to be targeted not at the city's movers and shakers but at certain communities.
The no campaign may well find itself in the winning camp next Friday morning, through a combination of voter apathy about an issue which does not immediately solve day-to-day hardships and Nottingham Labour's famed ability to get the vote out (particularly a postal one).
But even those movers and shakers sympathetic to the city leadership will not view this as a victory. The yes campaign has attracted significant discreet backing from people who believe that, for all its undoubted community-level achievement, the city council has failed to spell out a vision of where Nottingham needs to be in the future.
While ministers might be expected to say Nottingham will miss the cities' boat without a mayor (this is a government initiative, remember), senior civil servants in Whitehall have also suggested the city appears to be confirming itself in the role of a "second division" player, confirming the earlier analysis of former Nottingham MP Alan Simpson.
Their concern is that the city council - despite the presence of some genuinely talented and committed public servants - doesn't appear to have an over-arching vision for Nottingham's economic future, and isn't seen knocking on departmental doors in Whitehall to press for help delivering it.
Other cities are, partly because they always have done, partly because they are responding to a widely held cross-party consensus that cities should be drivers of economic growth across their surrounding area.
This is why the tone struck by the no campaign has gone down badly in some influential quarters. It has failed to address the ambitions and concerns which lie behind some of the support for the yes campaign.
These are people who think growing the city economically and geographically presents the best long-term opportunity to overcome its notorious – but misleading – figures for poor education, poor skills and crime. In their eyes, a campaign built around ‘no change’ is the wrong answer to the questions the mayoral campaign has raised.
I don't think those questions will go away even if the idea of an elected mayor is rejected on Thursday. Government has also left the door open to further discussion about the city's boundaries, which probably hold the real key to addressing Nottingham's long-term economic and social ambitions.
If, of course, its leadership believes this kind of big picture vision really matters. For those whose views about the city transcend political allegiances, this latest leaflet is not an optimistic sign.

Nottingham's Growth Plan: The race is on

If Nottingham’s Economic Growth Plan is going to work it will have to break new ground and do it quickly.
Those were the key messages to come out of the launch of this draft plan at The Council House this morning.
It was encouraging to see some of the most high-profile figures from across the city turn out for its launch – a measure, perhaps, that there is recognition across the board that we are at a critical point in the city’s future.
Prof David Greenaway, the economist who leads the University of Nottingham, gave a beautifully succinct vision of where the world economy is at and where it leaves a place like Nottingham. Miatta Fahnbulleh, who is head of the Cities Unit in the Cabinet Office in London, told the room that Government was ready and willing to help cities which could show they had a vision for growth and knew how to deliver it.
But it was Sir John Peace, the chairman and co-founder of Experian, who made possibly the most thought-provoking contribution. His speech was about the need for Nottingham to fully comprehend the late Steve Jobs’ guiding principle: Think Different. But it was book-ended by two films, one which delivered a machine-gun barrage of statistics about the connected world’s change-at-the-speed-of-light, the other a portrayal of the corrosive impact of youth unemployment.
It consisted of a series of young people talking frankly about the difficulties they faced trying to find work, several of them delivering a judgement that many people in business should find pretty shocking: that the more doors they knock on, the more they got the feeling that business is turning its back on the young unemployed.
Sir John’s view is that youth unemployment is a potentially poisonous problem which has now reached levels which dictate that all responsible businesses should step up to the bar and do everything they can to help tackle it – whether that is going into schools to directly address the skills/attitude problems employers complain about, or offering young, unemployed people work experience or apprenticeships.
Sir John, who is also chairman of Standard Chartered Bank, moves in some very well-connected circles and I suspect his view also reflects the significant political pressure bearing down on corporate Britain to show that it needs to act less selfishly and more responsibly.
There is much to commend in the draft Nottingham Economic Growth Plan, and the City Council is already hard at work on some of its key features (notably a serious bid to secure crucial funding for investment in digital infrastructure).
Beyond council leader Jon Collins and chief executive Jane Todd, it is being steered by Councillor Nick McDonald, executive assistant for economic development, and John Yarham, the officer who heads economic development.
Nick McDonald repeatedly emphasised that the council did not want the plan to be seen as a council document, and the challenge now is to get Nottingham’s business community involved in its development before it is finalised in April.
I was sitting next to Adam Bird, the chief operating officer of the technology company Esendex during the presentation and he made a couple of interesting points afterwards: that the council has got to overcome the natural tendency of most businesses to simply ask ‘What’s in it for me?’, and that the plan will work best if it focuses on creating an environment that allows business to get on with the job.
For all sorts of reasons, time is short. Outside the barely believable myopia of the Eurozone and away from our own obsessions with recession and regulation of banking, the Asian economies are accelerating at a meteoric pace and the American economy is waking from its slumbers.
The Nottingham Economic Growth Plan needs real vision and some clearly identifiable targets. But it also needs to be short, sharp and deliverable.
The race is on…

Fools, buffoons and inward investment

For those of you who look the other way when hot air gets spewed out, there’s been an ongoing spat between Nottingham City Council and the Government over the council's refusal to comply with guidelines saying local authorities should publish online details of all expenditure over £500
The principles have been well and truly buried underneath a playground-level scrap between Jon Collins, the leader of the council, and Grant Shapps, a junior minister.
An innocent victim of this dignified debate (so dignified that the words ‘buffoon’ and ‘foolish’ have been used in official press statements) has been the Nottingham property industry’s attendance at the biggest property and investment show in Europe, MIPIM.
In years past, the Team Nottingham delegation has combined property professionals like surveyors, civil engineers and architects, with representatives from the city council, its inward investment wing and the city’s public-private regeneration company.
The delegation has been based in a large motor yacht in the harbour at Cannes, the French coastal resort where MIPIM takes place. It has been funded by a mix of council money and private sponsorship.
Last year, that council money amounted to around £30,000. To put it in perspective, it is less than one-tenth of the money spent by city councils like Birmingham.
According to Grant Shapps, Nottingham’s £30k amounted to the public’s money being used to fund a council ‘jolly’ to the South of France.
I have news for Mr Shapps: the council is going to Cannes again in around a month’s time.
It won’t be paying a penny, though. The presence of its widely-respected inward investment head, Lorraine Baggs, is being wholly funded by the private sector.
What does this tell us? Let’s cut to the chase: the ‘debate’ about whether or not Nottingham should go to MIPIM is almost wilfully naive. The real question underneath the Little Englander nit-picking is this: do you want your city to attract new investment which will bring jobs and money? Or not?
Now, Nottingham does have some basic economic advantages over its main regional rivals. One of the reasons why, all other things being equal, it is always more likely to attract inward investment is that it’s bigger – bigger physically, bigger catchment, bigger talent pool, bigger universities, bigger professional support, bigger range of corporates, bigger local authorities, bigger experience.
In bigger cities there is a greater possibility of a business being able to satisfy its requirements than there is in smaller locations.
(To put that into perspective, Birmingham has exactly the same advantage over Nottingham that Nottingham has over Derby. It’s all relative.)
But Nottingham is not alone in having a certain economic heft. Sheffield does. Bristol does. Leeds does. Newcastle does. Manchester and Liverpool are bigger still. And if there are cities of a certain size in the UK, multiply ten-fold on the continent.
It should be obvious by now that the idea that you can simply sit in the Market Square and wait for the next inward investment to turn up is barking mad. You have to get out there and make the best pitch that you can.
Which is what developers and property professionals do. But they cannot – and should not – be doing it on their own. The first question a big inward investor is going to ask any developer or property agent touting a site in Nottingham is: Have you got the backing of the council?
Why? For one thing, major development takes time, time is money, a delay because the council doesn’t like the idea means wasted professional fees on a large scale. So if council planners don’t like it, the inward investor’s choice is to either fight a battle or go elsewhere.
But having a council on board doesn’t just mean it is willing to advise on the best ways to solve planning dilemmas. Its inward investment team will also offer advice and information about the local workforce, travel, relocation, useful contacts and what it’s like to live in Nottingham.
While agents and developers can show an inward investor sites and buildings, the council fleshes out the picture of what it will be like to actually do business here.
It should be obvious by now that private and public sector have to act as a team in this intensely competitive field.
They are doing so at this very moment in the hope of attracting a very big inward investment into Nottingham. They will be doing the same at MIPIM.
And they really don’t need a playground scrap.