International Trade: Enterprise Zones key to attracting investment
ENTERPRISE Zones offer enormous opportunities for selling the benefits of the West Midlands to foreign economies, international trade experts have said.
The Government has conferred EZ status on two areas in the region – Birmingham City Centre and a combined i54/James Bridge Copper Works in the Black Country.
The rebirth of the EZ network is designed to spearhead growth in the areas concerned by encouraging investment and job creation.
Each zones benefits from measures such as relaxed planning conditions, cheaper rates and the promise of super-fast broadband.
The plan behind the Birmingham zone is to generate wealth from the city’s key professional services sector which can then be ploughed back into the Greater Birmingham area, which includes Solihull plus parts of southern Staffordshire and north Worcestershire.
The strategy for the Black Country scheme is slightly different. It anticipates attracting a large project to the i54 site which will act as an anchor enabling scores of supply chain firms to develop around it.
The Black Country Local Enterprise Partnership is hopeful the anchor will be Jaguar’s new engine plant, a development which could create thousands of new jobs and be worth millions of pounds to the local economy.
Speaking at a special RSM Tenon round table event on International Trade, chaired by TheBusinessDesk.com’s West Midlands editor Marc Reeves, and attended by foreign trade experts, Wouter Schuitemaker, investment director, Marketing Birmingham, said: “Enterprise Zones will be very useful in helping to sell the UK to foreign investors.”
Round table contributor Stewart Towe, who in addition to being head of the Hadley engineering group is also chairman of the Black Country LEP, said agencies such as Marketing Birmingham needed to demonstrate that the West Midlands was the UK’s manufacturing heartland and in doing so, would attract foreign investment.
To read more about how Enterprise Zones might offer opportunities for foreign investment, download the free RSM Tenon international trade supplement.
