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…

Nottingham's plan for growth

Government’s don’t grow economies, businesses do. Bur government in all its forms can make growth a whole lot easier – sometimes by what it does, sometimes by what it doesn’t do.
This week, we’ll find out what our own ‘government’ – Nottingham City Council – is going to do to help make growth easier in and around the city.
In front of an audience of businesses and city organisations, it’ll be unveiling the Nottingham Economic Growth Plan, a wide-ranging document which contains a range of ideas for what it will do – and what it won’t do – to help stimulate the city and Greater Nottingham economy.
Though the detail has yet to be determined, the Plan will already be familiar to some people. Partly because a draft has been out for consultation over the past few weeks, and partly because some parts of it are straight out of previous economic development documents.
Partly, also, because some of its ideas are plain common sense.
But that’s not to decry a genuine effort to get the city thinking about moving its own economy forwards.
And there are some genuinely big ideas in the Nottingham Economic Growth Plan – notably the idea that there should be a fund to back promising local businesses, and a separate fund to help kick-start stalled development schemes.
We haven’t seen the detail on either, but I know some serious work has been going on to try to make them happen. Here’s hoping.
There are also opportunities to exploit the use of local taxation.
The bigger picture is an identification of the key areas that will help the local economy grow. This is a mix of promising business sectors which can bring real value to Nottingham if they are sensibly supported, measures which would make doing business an easier, more friendly experience, and a push to raise skill levels.
You can probably guess the first two – creative, technology and science-based businesses which are built on original ideas you can’t ship offshore (plus the likes of retail), along with a push to raise the game of city planning (which, in the past, has been a miserable experience for developers).
It’s the last – skills levels – I’m going to look at because it is, in some ways, the single biggest challenge Nottingham faces. As I’ve blogged before, we need to get our heads around an unpleasant truth about youth unemployment – it’s a problem which has been around longer than some would like to admit.
While recession has certainly made it worse, official figures show that it started to accelerate around 2003-2004 and that there is a very serious issue with unemployment among 16-17 year olds. Some of these kids are not only leaving school with qualifications and attitudes which make them unsuitable for work, evidence in the Growth Plan suggests some are then going on spend time doing college courses which do nothing to improve their employability.
This is a waste of their lives and a waste of educational budgets.
So when the detail of the Growth Plan finally emerges, it has got to demonstrate that this awkward truth is being confronted.
Otherwise, the risk is that it is being seen to focus its efforts on the symptoms, not the cause, and tackling a problem in colleges which actually happens in schools.
Nottingham’s economy does have some structural issues which won’t be solved overnight. While only 20 per cent of the UK’s working population is in the public sector, in Nottingham the figure is closer to 30 per cent.
This not only means the city has a lower than average productive capacity (the public sector is, by definition, non-profit), it also leaves us exposed in an era when public spending is bound to be constrained for years to come.
So the city has to put much more emphasis on an entrepreneurial culture and the growth in the basic stock of businesses – we almost have to rebalance our own economy if we are to improve levels of prosperity.
Once again, that won’t happen overnight. The cultural traditions of what was once a large industrial city are taking decades to shake-off, and the youth unemployment suggests we are neither educating nor inspiring our kids in the way we need to.
A growth plan should NOT fixate on problems – entrepreneurial businesses certainly don’t. It has to start with opportunities and adopt measures which make it easier to exploit them.
Most of its success will rest not on what the city council does but on what business does. But if business gets it right then we should tell that story in the city’s classrooms. Our growth and their future should not be separated.