Liverpool City Region: IFB 2016 to be more concentrated says Mayor

LIVERPOOL will scale back the length of the International Festival for Business next time, after weighing up the success of the 50-day event which finished on July 22.

In an honest assessment, Mayor Joe Anderson said the next festival, due to be hosted by the city in 2016, will probably last four weeks, conceding that a decision to commit a week to different sectors had made the event too long.

“This was a leap of faith, we had no template to work from and now we have,” he told Thebusinessdesk.com. “We’ll shorten it down to four weeks and promote it more. We tried to give different sectors specific chunks of time and in some cases that may have been too long.”

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But Mayor Anderson stressed it had been a successful event that attracted 75,000 delegates from 88 countries. Work has now started on assessing how all this activity has been harnessed commercially.

“We’ll be evaluating the deals over the next weeks and months. We have quite a lot of leads with people who want to talk about doing business. UK Trade and Investment is delighted, deals were done with China and India. I’ve been inundated with requests to meet delegates in different countries. I would be absolutely amazed if millions of pounds of deals haven’t been done, but we’ll quantify them.”

The Government wants to see the annual value of UK exports double to £1tn by 2020 and IFB was part of that. Liverpool Vision’s own target is for the festival to generate more than £1.7bn in contracts and £100m in foreign direct over the next five years.

It was after the World Expo, where Liverpool had a significant presence, that Mayor Anderson, then leader of the city council, approached Lord Heseltine and Sir Terry Leahy with the initial idea of a major event, on a par with the Festival of Britain in 1951. The pair had just published ‘Rebalancing Britain: Policy or Slogan?’, a report for Government that was a blueprint for devolving power and budgets to the regions to fuel economic growth.

The idea chimed with the Government’s determination to increase exports. “You can only export more if you promote what you sell,” said the Mayor.

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