DEVOLVING power is currently a hot political topic, and will continue to be so for the foreseeable future. But what the discussions about the Government and its approach to decision-making in the regions obscures is an idea that can be much more pervasive – that the power in businesses is also concentrated centrally, in London, and that individuals must head south to capitalise on their own potential.
Andy Wood, Grant Thornton practice leader in Leeds, said: “Take a business like ours, clearly we are a people business – our main assets are our people.
“With the further strengthening of our brand we find it increasingly easy to attract people into a business like ours whether that’s from local schools and universities in Yorkshire or further afield.
“What I think we need to do – and this is a bugbear of mine – is keep people interested, excited and inspired by working in and around Leeds, Yorkshire and, dare I say it, the north. I don’t think, as a profession, financial services in the widest sense, that we do ourselves great favours sometimes by this constant pull down to London and the South East.
“I’ve felt the pressures over the years of needing to spend time in London to further my personal career, which is fine to a point but I have to say that we have a great opportunity across the north.
“There are lots of great dynamic businesses to work with across our region, we can offer those opportunities to our people to keep them within our region and not feeling the need to go down to London.”
Part of the challenge faced by individuals is the sense that London is where the real action is, but the business model adopted by professional services firms can provide a useful counterweight to this.
“Isn’t that about having businesses where the decision-making and power is here?”, asked DLA Piper’s office managing partner in Leeds, Sarah Day.
“It’s all very well having 8,000 people in a financial services centre but if the decisions are made in London that’s where it is. That’s why some of the professional services firms have been able to flourish, because in the nature of partnership decisions are made here.
“Therefore people are attracted to that, so I think in looking for growth and the businesses we support, we need to encourage businesses where the decision making is here and I agree we should increasingly think of here as ‘the north’.”
But Leeds, in the same manner as other large regional cities, must develop an identity and confidence that can enable it to engage with London – which naturally attracts and generates a huge amount of professional services work – on its own terms.
She added: “The other side of the story is we are not just here to do work generated by London. The Yorkshire business to me is a mixture of, yes, local businesses but also the expertise we have here and we should be selling that. Otherwise we are just selling on price – and it’s a race to the bottom.
“We need to make sure when we are selling ourselves as a region, whether it’s the north or whether it’s Yorkshire, that we take advantage of the price differential when it’s there, but we really sell it on the basis we can do this.”
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Part of the challenge faced by individuals is the sense that London is where the real action is, but the business model adopted by professional services firms can provide a useful counterweight to this.
