Sixteen percent. That’s the proportion of the people in the North of England who feel business will fare well over the next few years in their region according to research Headland ran last week. And in London and the South East? As is now wearily familiar, prospects look brighter.
But what about business itself? How do companies, especially outside of the South East, feel about the new government, its policy agenda, and their prospects for the next five years?
To find out, Headland hosted a business roundtable in Leeds on Friday bringing together business leaders from across Yorkshire and the Humber. Organisations representing the food, retail, tech, infrastructure, energy, tourism and financial services industries debated what should be top of the agenda to drive growth in the North and what assistance would be genuinely useful from Westminster – and what wouldn’t.
It’s fair to say it was a lively discussion with some impassioned and at times differing views, but some of the themes that drew common consensus included:
- A plea for stability: perhaps unsurprising, but like business elsewhere in the country there was deep fatigue with policy chop and change, reversal of decisions and muddled thinking in Whitehall and Westminster.
- A frustration with short-term obsessiveness: as one attendee put it, “a lot of what we need won’t pay off for 15 years, but who’s going to be brave enough to make such long-term commitments versus a 5-year parliament?”. Which led onto one area in particular…
- The need for more and better infrastructure: 12 months on and the depth of feeling about scaling back HS2 remained clear, even though the Yorkshire arm of the project had been cancelled two years previously. Coincidentally, on the same day our breakfast was held, a new proposal for a cheaper rail investment plan in the North was launched, though it remains to be seen if the ideas proposed will gain traction.
- Support to kickstart markets, not handouts to sustain them: there was no shortage of appetite, ideas or success stories in the room, but there was a clear feeling that supportive frameworks, kickstarts, and market-making mechanisms for certain industries have been severely lacking. Listening to the challenges faced on the Humber and further north by companies trying to grow a low-carbon energy industry brought to life the frustration felt about a lack of this kind of support when it has been so clearly shown to work in other fields and other geographies.
As we head into a party conference season where UK-wide growth, productivity, and government-directed investment will be high on the agenda the mood was perhaps best captured by my fellow Headlander, Ed Young, who summarised things towards the end of breakfast: “it’s not about handing out lots of grants or big photo opportunities but about making life as easy as possible for the businesses and entrepreneurs creating jobs and wealth here. To really unlock higher wages and bigger opportunities in the north we have to genuinely back businesses here.”
Read more Insights & News