This speech was delivered to guests at the West Midlands Mayoral Dinner on 28 September.
“I want to tell you three things: what’s going on with our revival; what are the fundamentals of our economic growth; and then our investment opportunities.
I’m not going to talk about individual sites. I almost want to write the first paragraph of the board report as I would describe it – why believe in this place, why might you think it’s a place worthy of consideration?
We know how to lead. The West Midlands was the workshop of the world with the coal fields of Dudley back in the 18th century. We were leading again in the run-up to the pandemic, whether you look at employment or growth or inward investment. We were the best performing region outside of London.
Being entirely honest, we’ve been hit very, very hard by the pandemic. The once-deserted New Street Station concourse says it all. We know we’ve had a very big hit economically. But life is coming back. We are beginning to see our towns and cities return.
Last weekend, Birmingham celebrated the Pride Festival and Coventry had the City of Culture. Life is returning to normal and all the economic indicators are turning. Critically, the fundamentals of our region have not changed.
“Stick to the plan”
First of all, we have a clear strategy. In times of uncertainty you’ve got to stick to your plan. Anyone in business knows that. We have this. The prime minister no longer calls it a local industrial strategy, but the fact that they are behind it is absolutely right. You choose the sectors where you are going to compete by international standards and you choose the supply side pieces which are going to help the businesses in those sectors really outperform.
When it comes to housing, we have an enormous target – 215,000 homes by 2031. It’s a bigger number than anywhere outside of London. And we were ahead of our target. That’s pretty unusual for a region of the UK to be able to say that.
We’ve done that in all sorts of ways: collaboration between the different authorities across the West Midlands, but also deploying public sector finance to de-risk schemes that would have been difficult – working with St Modwen at Longbridge, a site that’s been derelict for 16 years since MG Rover went bust and elsewhere. We’ve got lots of these that we are bringing back to life.
We are bringing back commercial schemes as well as housing schemes. One I really love is from Henry Boot, called Phoenix Head. It’s coming out of the ground in Walsall, previously probably the most polluted place in all of Britain.
We’ve taken brownfield remediation to a specialism now. This is being built in Wolverhampton by the university, an institute specialising in the techniques around brownfield remediation – a strength of ours for the future.
“Better connected”
If we turn to transport, the West Midlands is choosing to leave the car behind. In a region that was built for the car, our citizens are choosing to embrace public transport. Everyone knows the region that will be better connected will perform better economically. We are spending about £1bn on expanding our urban metro network opening at Edgbaston just before Christmas and opening the lines from Walsall to Wolverhampton, extending and building new stations to welcome people to our cities.
Thinking about green transport, Coventry has just won the national competition to be the first full electric bus city – every bus there will be electric in just five years’ time. We are bidding now for a huge hydrogen fund for Birmingham and the Black Country and, of course, returning to green investments across active travel with what I call ‘Uber for buses’. We are making the place much better connected, closing the gap between us and London in terms of public transport.
We are creating a skilled workforce. The first way we do that is through bringing more skilled people in. Some cities in the North might have more hype than us, but young Londoners are voting with their feet because they see the opportunities there.
We are also retraining our citizens, including those that have fallen out of employment, in sectors including digital, in construction and hospitality. Our digital boot camp started in Birmingham and is now going nationwide. As a consequence, we are a better qualified workforce than we used to be, by a very long way.
Our universities are also critical to our attraction as well. We have more graduates than any other region outside of London and each university has concentrated areas of expertise – Warwick has that concentration around automotive, Birmingham’s Aston University has work being done around the energy sector and Birmingham City has creative work.
Those are the fundamentals that give us confidence around the supply side, but what are the investment opportunities and why should anyone invest? The message is very simple – you’re in good company. The market has got the message. Of course, London wins more inward investment than anywhere else in the country. But, for five years in a row, we’ve been second, even in the tough years in the pandemic, with Goldman Sachs choosing Birmingham as their second UK headquarters.
The government is also putting its money where its mouth is in terms of relocating, to Birmingham, Wolverhampton and Coventry, with four government departments now making their second headquarters in the West Midlands. Underpinning so many of these investments is High Speed 2. It is definitely happening, it is being built and trains will be running from Curzon Street in the middle of Birmingham through the Interchange in seven years’ time. There, Arden Cross is the single biggest investment opportunity across the West Midlands and, I would argue, probably just about the best investment opportunity in Europe.
Climate response
This is all underpinned by a very confident approach to net zero by 2041 across the region. We have over £1bn addressing the public transport issues. In our domestic sector we have retrofit schemes in our five-year plan, we are putting our own money on the table. But we are also working with industry. The low-carbon manufacturing sector is the fast-growing sector in the West Midlands.
We have the cluster concentrated around Coventry. The mega project that we are determined to deliver is our West Midlands gigafactory on the site of Coventry Airport, in the centre of that cluster with Jaguar Land Rover close to it, Lotus and LEBC. We are just at the stage of planning going in and negotiations with government, JLR and potential manufacturers to come to this site. People get very excited about Nissan, they’ve done a brilliant job to be quick at it, but this is about five times the scale of what is being built in the North East. That’s our ambition, to lead that sector.
What are we doing to enable green housing? Urban Splash’s Port Loop development to the west of Birmingham, 2.5 miles from the city centre on the canal, is using modern methods of construction. Any scheme that we put forward we are now looking for 20% of homes to be produced in that way. We are heading towards our zero carbon target.
I know that house prices are not the only way of assessing the property market, but the stats don’t lie. The West Midlands is the fastest moving property market in terms of residential prices in the last year.
Levelling up
The government talks about levelling up. What is levelling up? It is this. You have to have a committed government, we have to know our role and then we have to work with the private sector. Levelling up won’t be achieved by government cash handouts, it will be achieved by working hand in glove with the private sector.
That is what I believe we’ve demonstrated over the last few years that we do very well. A few years ago we won the competition to be the government’s testbed, with one of those partnerships set up, an arm’s-length body. Now, clearly, we are the number one region in the UK for 5G connectivity. We can do it in that partnership.
Now is our time. The eyes of the world next year will be on Birmingham for the Commonwealth Games. We are determined to use that moment to project ourselves in a way in which arguably we’ve not done as well as we needed to in the past. It is a huge responsibility to host those games and we will do with great panache and hopefully draw people into our story, so they can assess just what the opportunities are. It might stimulate you to think: is there an opportunity for us in this story?
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