Liverpool needs ‘massive SME support’, says former Cameron adviser

PHILLIP Blond, the thinker and academic whose work influenced the Conservatives’ localism agenda, has called for a radical new approach to secure the future economic prosperity of Liverpool.

Speaking at the Liverpool X conference yesterday, Mr Blond said the current strategy of seeking large employers to invest, while “building more and opening more bars” would not be enough to grow the economy and create jobs.

Instead, there should be a massive focus on supporting and attracting start-ups and small businesses, incentivised with business rate relief and free rent, alongside more dynamic leadership from the local authority, and a complete change in the way many state-funded services are delivered.

Blond, who grew up in Liverpool, said he would like to see large amounts of state spending handed directly to communities, a bottom-up civic renewal outlined in his book Red Tory which influenced David Cameron’s notion of a Big Society. Mr Blond has since criticised the Conservatives for abandoning these policies in favour of a “re-toxifying 1980s approach to the deficit”.

He told the audience at Camp and Furnace in the city’s Baltic Triangle: “It’s undeniable the progress that has been made – what the waterfront has achieved, how much better the city is in so many ways but it’s also reached its peak.

“There’s something missing, there’s a belief that what we’ve done in the past will be sufficient for the future – building more, opening more bars. Liverpool Waters is a mystery to me. If you walk down Dale Street almost every office block is empty. We need something new. We’re still a city that lacks graduates, that has 90,000 unemployed, there are still 45,000 less businesses than we need. So doing more of what we do isn’t going to work.

“What’s also clear is there seems to be no guiding intelligence from anyone in overall control, no co-ordination and no vision. Look at Manchester, it’s been run by very intelligent people for a very long time which is why it has the success it has.”

Referring to the state of the city’s private sector, he said: “It’s pretty bleak, Liverpool just doesn’t have the private companies, the start-ups that it needs. Unless we can create a new private sector on a grand scale Liverpool can’t hope to recover. The economic strategy is aimed at the big players.

“We have nothing for start-ups and small business. What we have is so small as to be embarrassing. We need to create a massive, at scale offer for SMEs that would involve, jobs, training, skills and capital investment. SMEs are more innovative and put in more jobs than anything else yet we have nothing to offer them.”

Arguing that the state cannot protect the vulnerable, it “only makes matters worse”, Mr Blond called for large amounts of spending to be given directly to communities. He said central government controls 19% of local government expenditure in Germany, 35% in France and 72% in UK. in Liverpool it’s more like 90%.

“There will be no revival unless we have a new offer from the public sector… Redistribution can never catch up with wealth creation. We need to turn it upside down and make it holistic, gather all the expenditure and push it down to the most local level possible and let either new civic bodies form or those groups commission for themselves.”

He called for new forms of local governance such as a senate or House of Lords-style body, made up of players from the community, business and academia, that could hold the city council to account. Mr Blond concluded by listing the city’s physical qualities which he believes give it a competitive advantage: “I see no reason why Liverpool can’t become one of the leading British cities… they can do it in Manchester, which is a lot less attractive, let’s face facts.”

Liverpool X was organised by Liverpool-based marketing and design firm Archetype.