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!

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...

Nottingham's Creative Quarter: It's better than b******s!

You might say it was when they talked about the money, or the skills, or the mentoring. And all of those things matter.
But for me the defining moment of the Creative Quarter workshop held in Nottingham was the moment when someone near the front delivered the judgement: “This isn’t bollocks.”
Too right.
I’m not being flippant (not much, anyway). This was unvarnished evidence that an audience of people who’ve seen economic initiatives come and go like trains in the night thought that Nottingham’s plans to develop a whole new quarter of the city actually made sense.
And so they should. For there are two key differences between the Creative Quarter plan and the now-wearily familiar CGIs of dreamboat developments that were wheeled out to wow us during the credit boom: this one’s tapping into an existing heritage – and it’s got money behind it.
Friday’s workshop at the Antenna creative hub saw people talk about Nottingham’s industrial past, the potential for social and environmental returns, inclusiveness, even the difference extending Nottingham’s political boundaries might make (yes, that one again).
But the single most important byte of information was contained on a Powerpoint slide flashed up by John Yarham, the City Council’s director of economic innovation. What did it show? £37 million for a venture capital fund, £20 million for a technology grant fund, £8 million of investment in infrastructure, money for start-ups, and business rate incentives.
As I’ve blogged before, when we talk about the creative quarter and the money lined up behind it, we’re really talking about a broad sweep of activities which range from programing, data analytics and life sciences through to creative design, digital content and media. All have knowledge at their heart, all have been present to varying degrees in the Nottingham economy for decades.
The audience at Friday’s event came largely from the creative design and media end of that spectrum. Some tuned in very quickly to the huge implications of the Creative Quarter initiative (Susi Henson, with some tough business experiences under her belt, spotted rent rises immediately), others were wondering how to connect with it, a few wanted to weld it to their own cultural cause.
It’s bigger than that, and the political and economic imperatives underneath it mean it will inevitably do some things a few people in the room won’t like. That’s business.
Yet there were some fascinating contributions to the debate about what Nottingham’s Commercial Quarter is going to be driven by. Adam Bird, the Esendex CTO whose idea of downtime is a quick 100 miles on a bicycle, banged on about business stepping up to the bar and collaborating in the name of economic progress.
This wasn’t woolly idealism, but the product of Bird’s own experience of what it takes to nurture an environment attractive to the techies which firms like his can collectively feed off.
This is about more than well-paid jobs: it’s about events they like to gather at, surroundings they feel at home in and facilities they value. It is understanding that these people look for a fulfilling way of life rather than a Perspex tech palace with ultraband bragging rights.
So it’s wrong to dismiss Bird’s approach as wishful thinking which ignores hard-headed commercial reality. It’s anything but: businesses who want to make the most of the commercial quarter – whether it’s being a part of it or selling services into it – need to understand that. Some of the businesses that grow or set up there will be familiar, traditional animals. Others may have a different cultural feel.
Councillor Nick McDonald, who leads the city council portfolio on jobs, skills and business, also made a number of interesting observations. The Creative Quarter has to deliver politically, and this is why it actually covers a broad range of business and a hefty chunk of the city – including Eastside, a stalled regeneration zone which should have been full of gleaming flats and offices by now if you believed the noughties CGIs.
It’s also the reason why a central component of the Creative Quarter/City Deal hooks into the massive issue of skills and youth employment. This is a nasty problem which has been darkening our corridors for far too long and all initiatives of this kind must have a component which answers the question: what does the future hold for our kids?
This tracks back to Adam Bird’s point: businesses cannot criticise an economy if all they’re going to do is take something out of it. If they think GCSEs are meaningless and don’t rate the skills of job applicants…well, do something about it.
While some involved in the workshop were nervous about attaching too much expectation to an initiative which, as Confetti's Craig Chettle put it, is still in the foothills, McDonald was happy to admit that Austin (home of ‘Keep it Weird’) was part of the inspiration, and pointedly said that Nottingham had been too inward-looking in the past and shouldn’t be ashamed to brag a bit.
There is, potentially, a massive amount to brag about at the moment. Besides the Creative Quarter and the wider City Deal, we have the tram expansion (£600m), the A453 widening (£140m), the transport interchange (£60m), the enterprise zone.
Very few cities can offer such a portfolio of opportunity for the next generation.
Nick McDonald said one of the reasons why the city had been shy about shouting about itself abroad was that overseas ‘jollies’ tended to up on the front page of the Nottingham Post.
The surprise would be if the opportunity presented by the Creative Quarter doesn’t make headlines at MIPIM and beyond. It’s a big story.

MIPIM: What next for Nottingham?

Back in March, I was lucky enough to hitch a ride to MIPIM, the international property, investment and economic development expo which takes place in the agreeable surroundings of Cannes.
I went with Team Nottingham, the informal group of surveyors, architects, civil engineers and other property professionals who kept the city's flame burning on the international stage after the city council decided it could no longer justify a yacht in Cannes harbour at a time of cutbacks.
While I can guess at the politics behind this decision, it left Nottingham looking a bit small town compared to the UK's other big cities. Team Nottingham has tried to overcome that for the past couple of years by paying for key officers from the council's development and inward investment teams to come with them.
Their presence added value to discussions about potential deals, and helped put the city in the spotlight when a major inward investment was announced and an award for being a key European business city was handed over.
But how will Nottingham tackle MIPIM next year? Getting your presence right takes months of planning and it has to take some key decisions very soon.
The first is what Team Nottingham is. Should it remain an informal group of property businesses using the city's name and opportunities as a hook to try to develop relationships and opportunities? Or should it go back to being what every other city at MIPIM is - an official delegation led by a figurehead where business and officials unite around a purposeful message?
And can Team Nottingham stay at the compact size it's been for the past couple of years?
The answers aren't straightforward. And it isn't just the existing Team Nottingham that has some thinking to do. The city council has to decide whether it's serious about one of the single biggest inward investment events in the world.
With a £600m tram expansion, a £140m fast road to the motorway, a £60m City Deal, a £60m transport interchange, an Enterprise Zone and a major push for a creative quarter all signed off, a half-hearted presence would be like building a moonshot and leaving it on the launch pad.
In short, it has some serious bragging rights and tangible opportunities rather than me-too CGIs. And worries about council staff being seen near flash yachts can be forgotten. What Mipim is - and isn't - is now well understood where it matters.
It clearly wants to influence the future direction of Nottingham's presence at MIPIM. So what is it bringing to the table in terms of resources and ideas?
As for the current Team Nottingham, it will struggle to maintain its compact size, especially if the city council comes back on board properly. The council can't support a closed club, and the Team sorely needs greater resources if it is going to raise its profile. More team members ought to mean more resources whether that's cash or in kind.
This is a sensitive issue for some Team Nottingham members, who probably feel the work (and money) they put in to keeping the whole show going for the last couple of years entitles them to either sectoral exclusivity or a better deal than latecomers.
The biggest question of all is what kind of profile Nottingham wants at MIPIM. Derby appeared to have a bigger budget and a slicker presence in March. But that presence was very traditional and ended up looking and sounding similar to a number of other English provincial cities, who seem to think samey CGIs and weary 'open for business' slogans are all you need.
Nottingham mustn't fall into that trap. Nor does it need to: it has some genuinely unique opportunities in the shape of tangible, properly financed projects rather than political pipedreams. A shoestring presence and me-too messages will sell those opportunities short.
There has been the odd hint sometimes that the city council doesn't see this kind of event as important, as if it is blinded by the glitz and doesn't appreciate the number of high-level decision-makers who lie behind the show - decision makers whose millions deliver jobs and growth.
Sure, there are aspects of the show which seem overblown and distasteful. But that is only one part of it and isn't where the real business gets done.
The city doesn't need to spend a fortune ( though the price of hotels and apartments means a yacht is actually a cost-effective presence). It can be smart rather than showy. But MIPIM is a stage - and Nottingham has to come out from the wings and step into the spotlight.
Come next March, Nottingham, and it's show time.

MIPIM 2012: The next time round I'd...

Travel lighter. The smart delegates were one-bag only. Clothes were smart-casual and therefore multi-purpose, while laptops have been comprehensively killed-off by iPads. It’s not that laptops are necessarily technically inferior (though they’re slower to fire up than anything Apple), it’s that when you have to take them out of a laptop case when they go through the airport scanners they are a real faff.
Take an iPad. They are single-handedly killing off laptops and netbooks because they are easy to carry, fire up immediately, run graphics brilliantly and act like a portable office while looking both stylish and professional. The Russians may have sprayed millions at their stands, but the wow factor for me came from Manchester Airport Group’s Stephanie Mullenger, who clipped a laser-cut 3D model of a development on to the screen of her iPad and ran a movie which lit up different parts of the model from underneath while giving a detailed commentary. That’s ‘Think Different’ in action.
Drink more water. Unless you are jetset, corporate or from a Russian republic, you will be chasing meetings morning, noon and night. Breakfast is grabbed, late-night dinner devoured. In between, it’s a desert where you might just be able to grab a table at Café Roma if you’re willing to fight off the foreign hordes.
Walk nonchalantly across pedestrian crossings. English diffidence meant I hesitated when a blacked-out Bentley came at me when I was halfway across. If I’d displayed Gallic indifference the turbo-nutter batard would have stopped sooner. I resorted to a traditional salute to stop him.
Hire a park bench. Yacht for the week - £80-£100k; Stand in the Palais des Festival - £40-50k if you want room for a table; park bench – you could pay someone to hold it for you for a lot less. Alternatively, you could do what the Germans did and live up to your cultural cliché. They took over part of the beach…
Forget to tell people who I was meeting. Because they blag their way in and hog the person you need to talk to.
Get in training for Morrisons. The Irish bar a couple of streets back from the seafront may not be the last word in clubland, but its combination of 80s disco and Guinness is still enough to finish you of after a day pounding pavements.
Bug the Derby dinner. There was a frank exchange of views, I’m told.
Take ear plugs. You know who you are...

Au revoir MIPIM 2012



My Range Rover parked at Cannes...in my dreams



There’s something almost comfortingly familiar about a four-day trip to an exotic sun-drenched Riviera resort ending in an Irish bar with your ear drums being hammered by 1980s disco music.

But that’s how Nottingham’s mission to MIPIM chilled out last night. There were some notably impressive performances by ‘DJ’ Ashley Cowdrey of M&E firm CPW and the impossibly hip Tim Garratt of Innes England, but those shocking revelations are for another day (or sensible negotiation).

Before you run away with the idea that Team Nottingham’s trip to MIPIM has been a thinly-disguised journey to the usual boozy haunts, let me reassure you that the downtime has been well-earned.

The model Nottingham has adopted for MIPIM is a solid and sustainable one: a core of private sector property and construction industry businesses paying their way and bringing key public sector decision-makers with them to let would-be investors know that great development opportunities will not sink under a painful planning process.
David Bishop, Nottingham City Council’s corporate director of development, maintained a professional distance from raw deals while offering authoritative reassurance that planners understood what business was trying to achieve.
Solidly supported by the widely-respected Lorraine Baggs, the city’s head of inward investment, and the seasoned experience of Mike Taylor, head of Nottingham Regeneration, the council team provided a back-up which added authority to the whole delegation and off-the-cuff advice at the kind of impromptu meetings which dominate MIPIM.
If you want to criticise the glitz and glamour of MIPIM you can, because Cannes has a lot of it. The closest I came was nearly being glued to the tarmac by a be-chromed Bentley driven by someone for whom pedestrian crossings and the people who use them were clearly an inconvenience too far.
I’m ashamed to say that I showed my appreciation of his driving in the traditional English manner.
If you haven’t been to MIPIM what you have to get your head round is the fact that this is a veneer of glitz and glamour (and sometimes grossness) which comes from a Riviera resort within spitting distance of Monaco, the place where millionaires and billionaires go to look at their money.
The veneer is there to serve them, not the likes of Team Nottingham or most of the other ordinary business people who come to pack into four days meetings which would otherwise take months to tie down.
The truth is that this isn’t a playday away from home, but a frequently foot-destroying round of meetings and discussions which stretch from dawn until dusk.
The results of those meetings I’ll write about in Business Post on Tuesday. For now we’re well beyond dusk and Cannes has gone quiet.
But Nottingham has come away with a lot to talk about.

MIPIM: Another away win for Nottingham

It began in Derby, wandered through some of the best cities for business in Europe, and ended in a pizzeria not far from the yachts that bob up and down in Cannes harbour.

Such was the second day at MIPIM.
I reflected yesterday on what Nottingham had to offer the biggest property and development exhibition in Europe, but today began with a breakfast reception for what is grandly characterised as the Derby Embassy, the slogan for the travelling show that is Marketing Derby.
Unlike Nottingham, Derby has managed to pull together a comparatively substantial public sector budget which supports not just the activities of Marketing Derby but a walloping chunk of commercial projects ranging from phase one of a spec office development in Derby (elsewhere, no one digs earth without a prelet) through to a comprehensive revamp of Derby City Council’s HQ, and half the lease of the old Egg call centre (a deal which has enabled Indian-owned Hero TSC to set up a similar operation in the same building).
Fair play to Derby. It punches above its weight at an exhibition where many similarly sized conurbations simply don’t figure, and has a cohesive message which other locations will be jealous of (notably Leicester, which I’ll come on to in a moment).
The strength of its focus has already been well-illustrated by its refusal to take the decision which lost Bombardier’s Derby factory a huge rail contract lying down, and the fuss it made has almost single-handedly led to government looking again at the whole issue of large-scale public procurement rules.
Leicester, by contrast, is a curiosity. This is another substantial Midlands city which has a strong economy with plenty of hefty businesses and logical opportunities. So why isn’t it at MIPIM? The few people from Leicester who are here certainly felt jealous of what Nottingham and Derby are up to, wondering why there was no marketing material about their own city to hand out.
England’s provincial cities do get noticed at MIPIM because they talk tangible opportunities rather than grand, barely believable visions. Birmingham and Manchester have thrown several hundred grand at their presence and there is an expectation that they will be here.
Even though its presence is comparatively small-scale and supported by the city council rather than paid for, Nottingham’s presence has been discreetly effective. It made headlines on one of the big property consultancy stands, and it was rubbing shoulders with some of the biggest locations in Europe yesterday when it received an award as one of the best micro cities for business.
The award came from FDi Intelligence, a division of the Financial Times, and ranked Nottingham ahead of Geneva as a business-friendly location.
Stockholm, which won the main FDi award, has plastered its name all over the entrance to MIPIM. I’m not suggesting Nottingham should do the same, but there is every logic in gently ramping up the city’s marketing budget to support an award which has put us front and centre on an international stage.
Those who don’t come to MIPIM will inevitably focus on the yachts and the money because they make easy pictures and easy headlines. For many cities, that’s just not what MIPIM is about.
Sure, there will be some cities smooching would-be investors at some very expensive tables in Cannes. But not Nottingham. Last night it was largely in a pizza parlour reflecting happily on another day and another good win.

MIPIM: The only way is Up

Well, the Bar Up, anyway, which is where I finished my first day at that inimitable experience known as the Marché International des Professionnels d'Immobilier in Cannes.
MIPIM is the place where anyone who is anyone in European property comes to, variously, strut their stuff, network furiously and meet people away from home in circumstances which might allow conversations a little less complicated than usually permitted by the conventions of home turf.

As of mid afternoon today, it was also Suits On Sea, with people who could not be anything other than surveyors, developers, financiers, architects, engineers and consultants of all kinds necking bottled beer ten-deep on what must be one of the single busiest days of the year for the perfectly-placed Café Roma.

It’s perfectly placed because it sits opposite ‘The Bunker’, the less than pretty seafront Palais de Festivals, in and around which most of the stands at Cannes are based.

At MIPIM, there are stands and there are stands. There are the stands which simply satisfy the requirements needed to enable you qualify to buy a £1,500 entrance pass; there are the stands which project corporate brand values; there are the stands where wearily familiar commercial development schemes tend lose out to tired feet in search of a beer.
And there is Krasnodar (below). Krasnodar is the economic centre of south Russia, and it has not a stand but its own pavilion, one on which it is thought to have spent a cool £1 million. It is vast, full of enormous models which kids with Hornby train sets could only dream of, and technical tomfoolery which allows you to ‘hold’ an office development in your hand and twirl it round.

It is not alone. Other Russian regions and former Soviet republics appear to be engaged in a vast, political ‘look at me’ contest where enormous stands have massive models of new business districts, leisure developments, seaside resorts and statement buildings.

They have the look of some of the regeneration CGIs touted around the UK market when it was awash with debt funding all those years ago. As it stands, Russia has got rich on gargantuan oil and gas revenues, but I’m still left wondering whether there is really a market for this kind of computer-generated political ambition.

I’m out here with Team Nottingham, and my initial reaction was that our fair city simply didn’t stand a chance against this kind of development firepower.

But I’m not so sure.

There are cities like Krasnodar, which have thrown the financial kitchen sink at getting noticed. There are regions like the Catalan part of Spain, which appears to be chasing European regional development funding.

And there are cities like Nottingham, who have come to discuss specific, tangible development opportunities. Nottingham doesn’t have a vast stand, there are no Hornby train set models (though we could have done with a Corgi tram to hand out), and we are not touting schemes which looked like they were dreamt up simply to qualify for a slice of the euro pie.

What Nottingham was doing at a modest dinner at the Brasserie Bar Up was announcing an extension to the city’s enterprise zone, listening to Boots’ Mark Chivers explain the detailed plans for it, and hearing City Council director of development David Bishop pointing to the certainty that enormous sums of money are about to be invested in extending the tram and widening the A453.

As the evening wore on, it was also reflecting on the one-woman regeneration locomotive that is Jackie Sadek. Earlier in the day, the motormouth chief executive of UK Regeneration stood shoulder-to-shoulder at MIPIM with the head honchos from property consultancy Jones Lang Lasalle and Barclays Capital and announced a £33 million scheme to build 200 homes-to-rent in a new Sandfield Village development in Lenton.

This is a complex, potentially ground-breaking scheme borne out of the government’s decision to allow local authorities to kick-start city redevelopment through buy now-pay later deals for developers.

I’ll be writing more about this in the coming days in the Nottingham Post, but Jackie Sadek’s point was that where others were waffling Nottingham was making it happen.
Sandfield Village may not rival the glitzy ambition of Krasnodar. But I know where my money will be going if we lay odds on which scheme comes out of the ground first.

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.