The meeting was part of a series of face-to-face discussions with regional business leaders and government, and the second in recent months to identify the best approaches and innovations to growth to ensure we stimulate economic growth equally across all of our regions, including non MCA areas.

Primary areas of discussion included:

• Our role in helping to develop the Oxford Cambridge Growth Corridor, what Lord Vallance described as one of the biggest opportunities for growth in the UK – including hearing from Arc University Director, Alistair Lomax, on the skills for growth commission and the open innovation network they are building as part of Lord Vallance’s Oxford-to-Cambridge Growth Corridor.
• How our business leadership can work more closely with UKRI and Innovate UK on common aims and objectives, particularly in relation to how we can increase startups and scaleups, exploit world leading cluster areas, and overcome ‘border barriers’ to develop an intra-regional approach to innovation, especially across our universities.
• Working with government to shape an innovation proposal that can actively work with them to identify creative approaches to projects that can deliver at pace for government and to ensure those benefits are shared more widely.
• How our Business Boards can work with government on implementing the forthcoming High Street Strategy – an issue at the top of the in-tray of many a Business Board. This includes developing the government’s ‘high street hub model’ as a potential way forward – our Business Board leadership is working with government on sharing details of the work they already have underway across the Network which shows how the private sector is ahead of the curve in stepping up and supporting local businesses - tackling real time challenges which can be shared with other regions.
• How our business leadership can take the Small Business Strategy forward and utilise the Growth Hub network to support the government’s Business Growth Service, amid extremely challenging funding shortfalls for SMEs and the increasing challenge of business rates, regulation, employment and energy costs which are putting SMEs under intense pressure.

Business Board Network Chair, Mark Bretton, said:

“This was another of our successful roundtable discussions in person with ministers – it clearly demonstrated two key values. Firstly, the level of Business Board leadership and acumen that we bring to the table, that’s business people who actually run businesses, having a vital role to play in moving the dial on economic growth, especially as we face the economic hit from the Middle East war.

“The second value is the level of support Business Boards bring to urgent issues that local areas must deal with now to get their economies moving – whether that’s repurposing high streets, developing cluster areas of sector expertise that generate inward investment, supporting startups and scaleups and small businesses, working to boost innovation and tech, and utilising our business nous to overcome the challenges of getting growth moving. It’s businesses that grow economies, deliver taxes, and create jobs, we just need the environment to get on with that.”

Among the issues of concern raised in the meeting is how to ensure a degree of equality of opportunity in funding across the country, particularly between combined authority areas and non MCA areas. Business leaders made the point that about half of the country is not on a devolution pathway and we cannot afford to let those areas stall simply because of geography.

Our membership also highlighted the big challenge now facing Growth Hub services and Skills Bootcamps in supporting small business – the former help underpin the online Business Growth Service at ground level in all regions. With no successor to the UK Shared Prosperity Fund, which was meant to replace EU structural funds, we are going to see a decline of that Growth Hub service over the next 12 months, at a time when SMEs will likely need face to face help and support in tackling the economic shocks from the increasing conflict in the Middle East.  

The Business Board Network is also working with government on taking forward a project that seeks to utilise innovative and novel ways of overcoming barriers and obstacles to local growth and investment. Leaders showed how this ‘Test and Learn’ approach is already helping drive the government’s local growth agenda in all of our regions – from Liverpool’s industrialised housing delivery to Norfolk’s High Street work, our business leaders are stepping up and leading from the front.

ENDS