Special report: Cheshire & Warrington – talent wars
WITH its rolling plains, country lanes, parklands, pretty villages and market towns, this part of North West England is well renowned for the quality of life it offers.
That helps to attract people later in their careers, but when first starting out from university the pull of London is strong – not to mention the attractions of Manchester and Liverpool on the doorstep.
The battle to attract the brightest young talent is fierce. And for Cheshire and Warrington it can be a struggle just to compete, say business leaders.
Katrina Michel, chief executive of Marketing Cheshire, says: “Young people coming out of the University of Manchester with a 2.1 or first in STEM subjects are highly sought after. They are being offered starting salaries of £45-50,000 in London by investment banks and consultancies.”
She believes it all boils down to a combination of “aspiration, sexiness and the big wide world out there” tempting graduates with valuable skill sets.
Tim Frankland, joint managing director of Claremont Group, an interior design and build business based in Warrington, agrees. He says: “Most graduates coming out of university, across the board, want to live in cities. They want that lifestyle; it is part of what attracts them.”
There are also practical concerns for those working in Cheshire and Warrington – travel can be an issue.
Frankland says: “There are things like car insurance. They don’t want to rely on a car to get to work. Things like that have a real impact on them.”
He adds: “In terms of staffing for our sector there are challenges in terms of trying to get the right people. Historically we have tried to train our own.”
Michel adds: “Cheshire is a massively fantastic place to live if you can drive and you are on your second career, but it’s very hard at that early stage when there are so other many temptations.”
Malcolm Jackson of property group Langtree says the feedback it gets from companies in areas like software engineering, based at The Innovation Centre at Sci-Tech in Daresbury, is “they cannot get the right staff.”
He adds: “It’s not that they are not paying the right money, it’s not about the conditions. The people coming out of university are not quite right. The businesses need certain skill levels that they haven’t got.”
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Keeping hold of staff once they arrive can also be a big challenge when companies do find the right people – with the lure of Manchester and Liverpool again proving strong for the career minded.
Steve Cosgrove has first-hand experience of the challenges that exist in the IT sector. The chief operating officer of Adept4 IT services, based in Daresbury, says: “It is hard work. We spend a lot of money each year just giving pay rises to our existing guys so they don’t run off.
“They know themselves they are very marketable and we get to hear things so we sit down and talk to them, it is really tough.
“We have to use recruitment agencies constantly. It is expensive, paying 20-25% of the annual salary just to find the people in the first place, which is a huge overhead.”
And it’s not just graduate roles. Frankland adds: “If we are posting for an admin role or even an apprenticeship we struggle, because we are at Birchwood and it is trains, planes and automobiles to get there. We know we have to pay over the odds.”
Looking at the wider picture he adds: “We are turning out some good graduates, the way of keeping them in the north is to make sure there are decent jobs for them.”
Philip Cox of the LEP says: “Infrastructure is clearly very important. The other thing the public sector has to deliver is skills.
“We have the best skilled workforce certainly in the north but we are struggling with the skills of young people. Partly that is by exporting a lot of young people with A Levels. They go to university and tend not to come back.”
So, given all these difficulties, what are the attractions of being in Cheshire and Warrington?
The sub-region has more than its fair share of international companies such as Bentley Motors, Siemens, MBNA and Vauxhall. And existing transport links, including the motorway network, play their part in positioning Cheshire and Warrington as a gateway to the north.
The quality of life on offer also plays its part. Richard Anderson, chief executive of Crawford Healthcare, is in no doubt that his company’s base in the centre of the attractive, vibrant town of Knutsford helps attract graduates coming out of the big cities on “first rotation”.
He says: “It costs a fortune to be in the centre of Knutsford but people like working there.
“When we looked at moving offices we gave all our employees the choice of three or four sites and said ‘where do you want to work?’ and 95% of the people we asked wanted to work in Knutsford.”
Anderson can see why. He points out the range of restaurants in the town, its proximity to attractions like historic Tatton Park and the fact Manchester Airport is close by.
He says: “It was the most expensive option we looked at but it has been worth its weight in gold. We get a lot of young graduates coming out of Manchester on first rotation who want to work for us.”
Michel says that historically Cheshire’s lifestyle has proved a strong attraction for highly-valued skilled people. She says: “There’s a very large group of people that value that lifestyle, that’s why we are so successful.”
However, Cox stresses Cheshire and Warrington is not simply the commuter belt for Manchester and Liverpool. He points out that the sub-region “imports more people in the morning to work than we export. We have net inward commuting.”
And he adds: “It is not just people locating here because they like the lifestyle; they are locating here because they are doing business here.”
Cheshire’s green and pleasant land is a positive, and a selling point. But that also brings other challenges, says Michel. The county has been known as Manchester’s ‘green lung’ – an area city folk flock to at weekends and in the summer to breathe its fresh air.
That is good news for the tourism and hospitality sector. However, the more successful the big city down the road is, the bigger the number of visitors heading to the county at weekends, and that has consequences, she says – including clogging up local road networks.
Michel says: “The more economically successful places like Manchester are the more Cheshire, which is seen as ‘the green lung’ is going to be overrun at the weekend.
“We either embrace it; deal with it, or we can moan about it, but it is definitely a phenomenon we have noticed.
“We have started to be approached by people like the National Trust who can’t cope with the number of visitors they are seeing.
“We are trying to take people further afield into the countryside, so they don’t just sit five miles from the airport; otherwise we are going to be a car park for the whole weekend.”
She adds: “The desirability of Cheshire is a wonderful thing but it is fragile and could easily be spoilt if we are not careful.”
