To Coyne A Phrase

The need for speed

IT is difficult to see any downside to the announcements surrounding Birmingham and HS2 this week.

By choosing to base its construction company in central Birmingham, HS2 Ltd – the company charged with delivering the £50bn high-speed rail project – will be creating 1,500 jobs locally and the 100,000 sq ft it is taking at One Snowhill seems to have single-handedly turned a lack-lustre property market into one in which we are now talking about a potential shortage of Grade A space.

And the new Birmingham Curzon Urban Regeneration Company, being set up to oversee the redevelopment of the Eastside area near when the HS2 terminal will sit, will hopefully be able to do for that area what previous URCs have done for run down parts of other UK cities.

Infrastructure-led renewal is surely the right way forward.

But inevitably all the discussion is focused on Birmingham and it will be crucial to keep other West Midlands towns and cities on board by putting connectivity between them and HS2 right at the top of the agenda.

The place I feel a bit sorry for in all this is Stoke-on-Trent, which seems to have been overlooked entirely by those planning the HS2 routes north of Birmingham.

They seem to prefer using Crewe as a gateway to the north and despite the Stoke campaigners’ best efforts to make the case for routing HS2 through their city instead – which they did to the High Speed Rail Select Committee at Westminster recently – and despite some encouraging words from the likes of select committee chair Ian Mearns MP, the Crewe option has the feel of a done deal about it.

I hope I’m mistaken because the regenerative powers that we all believe HS2 will have for our towns and cities could make a heck of a difference to Stoke and its future economic prosperity.

I suppose there always winners and losers in projects of this kind and at least the Midlands as a whole is at the centre of things this time instead of being sidelined while major projects develop in London or the North West.

Just a thought. If Stoke doesn’t become part of the HS2 route why not establish the HS2 training college there by way of compensation?

Wish I was there

IT’S that time of year when everyone seems to be on holiday apart from me.

Luckily the HS2 news, amongst other things, has kept me busy at Business Desk Towers during the silly season but there have been times when it was so quiet that I’m sure I could hear the howls of protest from drivers stuck in the tunnel maintenance work-linked traffic jams several hundred yards away.

When I do get away, though, I’m one of those people who can turn off and put the worries of the workplace behind me.

But there are a lot of people who can’t, apparently.

A new survey reveals that a third of SME owners have cut their holiday short due to work related issues in the last year.

In addition, 81% of business owners admit to working on holidays while 68% of small business owners feel unable to switch off from work because they’re constantly ‘online’.

And if that wasn’t bad enough, 44% of respondents confessed to choosing holiday location based on ease of connections with work such as in a similar time zone or via a wifi connection.

Perhaps the results of the PeoplePerHour survey aren’t that surprising given that we live in 24/7 world of instant communications.

Sometimes there are so many telephonic and electronic gadgets fired up and pinging in my bedroom at night I might as well try to get to sleep lying on the roof of GCHQ.

But the importance of a spot of rest and relaxation shouldn’t be underestimated.

Unfortunately the days are long gone when the ‘gaffer’ would take a couple of weeks off, come back and with fingers crossed ask the person left in charge in his absence “everything been okay then?”

Not a bard idea

SO the first direct flight from China has touched down at Birmingham Airport, thanks to the new £40m runway extension which makes it possible for the types of planes you need to reach long-haul destinations to land and take off from there.

But let us not fool ourselves into thinking that the tourists piling off the China Southern Airways flight and the ones that will follow in their wake are here to see the sights that are immediately to hand.

More likely they will be using it as a convenient gateway for trips to Stratford-upon-Avon, Bicester Village, Oxford and London.

Nothing wrong with that of course. But why not make it a bit more obvious just how close we are to such attractions?

Occasional Business Desk correspondent John Duckers has long argued that the airport should be re-named Birmingham Shakespeare Airport and, whilst I don’t agree with the old duffer on many things, I think he’s hit the nail on the head with this one.

International visitors would immediately associate it with the most famous Midlander ever to have lived and it would locate us in their minds as being in close proximity to one of the key tourist destinations in the UK.

It has been a week of momentous transport news but, arguably, a simple name change could potentially trump everything else.

Of course there are lots of interested parties who would need to be convinced that it would be in their own best interests to make that change so don’t hold your breath!

Have a great weekend.