Unity – a word of only five letters but one that stirs all sorts of passions when you use it in relation to the West Midlands.
While football rivalry between the Birmingham and Black Country teams will never abate, there are other areas where maybe a re-think is warranted.
Talk of unity was re-started by Sir Albert Bore, leader of Birmingham City Council, who believes the regional economy will only be successful if the Greater Birmingham and Black Country Local Enterprise Partnership (LEPs) work as one.
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And he’s not just talk about LEP unity – he means the geographic areas covered by the two LEPs.
However, there was an immediate sort of “over my dead body” response from Mike Bird, leader of Walsall Council, who is reported as saying: “We do not want to join Birmingham and the Outer Mongolian LEP under any circumstances, and if they don’t like that, tough.”
Apparently not much room for manoeuvre there, then. Except that he did say they would co-operate with Birmingham on common interests and project: “We are after all part of the West Midlands”.
That’s the good news and echoes what we at Birmingham Chamber and our counterparts in the Black Country Chamber have been doing. We have joined forces to support Sir Albert and along with Margaret Corneby, chief executive of the Black Country Chamber, we have offered our backing to Atkins Global, who have been commissioned to carry out a review of transport in the cities and regions.
In a letter to Jonathan Foster-Clark, senior managing consultant at Atkins Global, we conveyed our support for the proposed Transport Governance Review.
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We added that the decision to launch a review of the transport arrangements in the West Midlands presents an opportunity to acknowledge the weaknesses of the current governance and is an opportunity to move towards more effective integration to deal with long-term structural challenges to the transport network.
Further demonstration of the business appetite for co-operation can be seen by the intention of the business transport groups that each chamber has, to work much more closely together. Discussions have been held at a detailed level to identify a shared transport agenda and commitments made to work together as one.
Between us, the chambers in Birmingham and the Black Country comprise some of the 海角视频’s oldest and largest business membership organisations covering an area of over 2.5m people. Together we represent around 4,500 businesses that employ over 250,000 people across Birmingham, Solihull, Southern Staffordshire, Dudley, Sandwell, Walsall and Wolverhampton.
Both organisations offer an extensive range of services to industry and commerce, having served the interests of business for over two centuries by promoting trade locally, nationally and internationally.
Back in Birmingham, the chamber is also hoping to unite businesses and their representative bodies around the cause of delivering better-integrated business support. Building on the detailed work the chamber did for Lord Heseltine, it is clear that local businesses need a simple signposting service to which they can turn to find out what help might be available. The chamber is well-placed to become a one-stop shop and we are working on how this might be achieved. It will only happen if businesses and those that provide services to business get behind a shared vision for the delivery of local business support.
Sir Albert said in his June 2013 policy statement that in the next year he wanted to work with Birmingham Chamber to deliver “a signposting scenario for Birmingham businesses”.
We are delighted to see Sir Albert recognising the importance of signposting to local businesses. Lord Heseltine’s ‘No Stone Unturned’ identified a long tail of under-performing businesses in the 海角视频, with as many as 30 per cent not reaching their potential. Unlike competitor countries like Germany, the Netherlands and Japan, 50 per cent of 海角视频 businesses seek no help at all. The 50 per cent that do seek help grow twice as fast as those that do not.
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Encouraging businesses to seek out help is not easy. ‘Build it and they will come’ simply does not apply in the business support space. There needs to be a proactive aspect to the service that seeks out businesses with the characteristics and potential for growth.
An early step will be for Birmingham Chamber to work with other business membership bodies in Birmingham as well as key providers like universities and colleges to understand exactly what a local signposting service needs to deliver to unleash private sector productivity and growth.
The chamber is already working with all the FE colleges in the GBSLEP area to create a single integrated offer for employers to make it easier and more attractive for small businesses to invest in skills training. During the summer months, the chamber will be working to advance this important agenda.
Whether across LEPs or within major cities like Birmingham, we will only make progress by working together. Unity is the watchword.
* Jerry Blackett is chief executive of Birmingham Chamber Group