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.

Sickies and surveys

Another day, another survey.
This time academics from Nottingham and Ulster tell us there has been a 40 per cent leap in work-related stress during recession. And that there is a 25 per cent rise in stress-related sickness absence.
While an increase is hardly surprising, measuring the impact an economic event has on the workforce does have clear value as it helps point to possible solutions and to an additional level of economic activity that is lost during a downturn.
There is one significant caveat with this survey, though. While I don’t for one moment doubt its academic rigour, there’s an important detail everyone should be aware of when they read about it.
The study draws its conclusions from two surveys of 17,000 workers in Ulster, one conducted in 2005 before recession struck and one in 2009 when it hit in a big way. So this is a heavyweight sample, from which you are entitled to draw some solid, in-depth conclusions.
But only about the public sector. For that’s where all 17,000 of those surveyed worked.
When you consider that only around 20% of the UK workforce is employed in the public sector, and that the working environment is often decisively different to the private sector, that raises some questions about whether it’s right to apply the conclusions from this survey to the whole of the UK labour market.
Historically, the public sector has always had higher incidence of sickness absence than the private sector, including days lost to stress-related illness. While businesses sometimes take a jaundiced view of why this happens, one of the reasons is that the public sector has more well-developed mechanisms for identifying and handling occupational health issues.
And while the private sector will often let people soldier on when they’re not feeling 100%, you might expect government in all its forms to make a point of sticking to the rules it has enacted.
While there’s little doubt that fewer people and fear of job loss does cause stress, there will be those who argue that in the private sector it will, if anything, make some people less inclined to throw a sickie because they feel the need to prove their worth.
There are some valuable lessons in this survey, though the two most important conclusions will be very familiar. One is that businesses are always likely to get the best out of their workforce if they look after them, whatever the economic weather.
The other is that surveys themselves should always come with a health warning...