City region in “pole position” to demand local empowerment from industrial strategy

An aerial shot of Birmingham city centre
Birmingham city centre

The Greater Birmingham and Solihull Local Enterprise Partnership (GBSLEP) has called for greater empowerment locally to enable businesses to make the Government’s planned industrial strategy a success.

The Government’s green paper was published in January, launching a three-month consultation that ended yesterday. A white paper is expected to follow this autumn.

“It’s something that we should have had when Adam was a lad,” said GBSLEP chairman Steve Hollis. “How can you run a competitive business without a plan?”

The Qatar-UK Investment Forum, which was held in London and Birmingham over two days in March, provided feedback from investors as to how they viewed the UK.

He said: “They were impressed that the UK as a country is having aligned thinking building around the industrial strategy. They want to know what the plan is and how we are going to get there.

“In this post-Brexit world, we need to go to market with a clear plan.”

The industrial strategy has been a central plank of Theresa May’s economic plan since she became Prime Minister last July, replacing the Department for Business, Innovation & Skills (BIS) with the Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy (BEIS).

The Government said it wanted to “hear from every part of the country, every sector of industry and businesses of every size” – although the volume of responses that have already been made public led Hollis to quip “I am not sure that there are enough civil servants to read all the responses”.

However GBSLEP’s “punchy” response is built around key themes of local empowerment and productivity.

It highlighted the “vital importance of sustained and long term national policy frameworks and funding” to support key issues affecting productivity that it said “should go beyond the lifetime of the current Parliament”.

It stressed the importance of “central government working closely with local agencies” to achieve productivity increases across the economy and to solve local problems.

The response also called for the further development of “the institutional framework to support industries at the local level” working with key stakeholders including industry bodies, universities, OEMs and Catapults to ensure that sector deals are in place at a local as well as national level.

Hollis believes the city region is “in pole position” and major schemes like Grand Central, Arena Central and Paradise show the achievements and ambition that it now has.

“Six years ago we used the burning platform – and we found ways of working better together,” he said. “We do have a much stronger platform in 2017 than in 2011.

“This is a happening place. We should be really optimistic about the future.”

Hollis believes the success over that period has been created by political and private sector leadership coming together with universities and others around a common strategy.

Aston University graduates

Aston University graduates

Elizabeth Woodfield, policy advisor at Aston University, backed the importance of universities in the development of the industrial strategy. She pointed to the 60,000-plus jobs that the West Midlands’ 12 universities provide or generate – 60% of which are outside the universities themselves.

She said: “One of our overarching messages about delivering growth across the whole country is that universities are among the largest existing investors in their own regions, and so their continued success actually plays a big part in driving regional growth.

“A policy environment which allows universities to flourish is one which also supports the delivery of growth across the whole country.”

The UK’s first degree apprentices will graduate from Aston University in July, and universities’ role in providing technical education and helping to address the region’s skills gap should not be overlooked, she added.

The CBI has called on the Government to set out a clear mission to make the UK economy more open, innovative and inclusive and, as a result, the most competitive in the world by the end of the next decade.

Carolyn Fairbairn, director-general of the CBI

Carolyn Fairbairn, director-general of the CBI

It wants the industrial strategy to aim to reduce the productivity gap between the worst and best performing regions by 15 percentage points by 2030.

Carolyn Fairbairn, CBI Director-General, said: “We must build on our leading knowledge base, drive a renaissance in our traditional heartlands of manufacturing and create a new wave of entrepreneurship by making the UK the easiest place to start and grow a business. By doing this we can raise productivity and improve lives in every community up and down the country.

“This vision should not be created solely by business, nor by Government. It must be created and owned by business, government and society together. To make this happen, it must be underpinned by a partnership between business and government that is the best in the world, based on trust and shared interest.”

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