by John Forkin.

Last week I spent a day in Aberdeen, a city in which we might fish for inward investors. Aberdeen’s high-tech oil and gas boom has led to overheating in business costs and associated staff shortages. Companies there are creaking.

For example, last year, Texan engineering giant Cameron chose to expand in Derby on the back of its success in Aberdeen. There may be more who follow the same route. While there (spoiler alert) I was struck by the blindingly obvious in how very Scottish it all felt.

There is probably no country more confused about its national identity than ours. Just stop anyone in a Derby street and ask them which country they live in. Answers will generally include variations on England, Britain or Great Britain.

The correct answer (as anyone who has passed through the pleasure that is US border control will attest) is the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. Quite a mouthful, and very few will have the time or inclination to spell this out. Of course that may all be about to change, as Scotland will soon hold a referendum on whether to leave the UK.

Seeking the views of the ubiquitous taxi drivers and some business people in Aberdeen, I got the impression that the pros and cons of independence are being carefully considered. The outcome will be finely balanced and may well boil down to issues grabbing the headlines in September 2014, when the referendum is to be held.

The possibility of becoming an independent country, for the first time since 1707, understandably generates both fear and excitement. As different as Scotland feels though, there is a place which most of us visit regularly that really does feel like another country – and it is our own capital, London.

These days, the East Midlands Trains service from Derby makes the trip a breeze. When we host investors who have come up by train they invariably comment, with genuine surprise, on the ease of the journey.

I accept there has always been a gap between London and the rest of the country – its function as the political, media, cultural and financial capital makes this inevitable – but I can’t help but feel something much more fundamental has occurred over the past decade.

Unless you are arriving on Eurostar, passports are not yet required to disembark at St Pancras. They soon might as well be because London has become a truly global city, increasingly looking out across the world and not up the M1 or M6.

Next time you are at St Pancras count the many tower cranes on either side of the station. I accept Kings Cross is a hotbed of regeneration but this construction boom applies all over the city. Cross any bridge over the Thames and you will see anywhere between 20 to 40 such cranes piecing together new floor space for living and working.

A few weeks ago, the Estates Gazette reported that there is currently 9.7 million square feet of office space under construction in London. Add to this schemes in the pipeline such as the Shell building on the South Bank (800,000 sq ft), and mixed developments such as at Battersea Power Station (8,100,000 square feet) and you begin to see the gargantuan scale.

Contrast this with Liverpool, where office take-up in the first quarter of 2013 was a mere 35,000 square feet, and you get a sense of the imbalance.

The Financial Times recently reported there were more construction cranes in London than in the whole of the rest of the UK put together – by a significant margin. The boom is being financed by international capital and the sheer scale of the rents payable, which last week touched an eye-watering £120 per square foot in the West End.

For years there was hope that government would relocate civil servants out of London, the so-called Lyons Review. Bureaucracy resisted this and, in truth, there was very little movement before the whole concept was eventually abandoned. If Derby and other regional cities are to have any hope of developing their central business core then we have to find ways of applying the principles of the Lyons Review to the private sector.

Google is currently constructing 1,000,000 sq ft headquarters at Kings Cross to host 3,500 staff. By my reckoning, basing these staff in Derby would save £12,000 per employee per year. Locating only 500 staff 90 minutes away in Derby would save a company like Google £60 million every 10 years. If we don’t address this rebalance maybe we soon will need passports at St Pancras.

Published in Business Weekly, Derby Telegraph on Wednesday 5th June 2013.

By John Forkin.

This time next week more than 300 people will converge on Pride Park Stadium for the inaugural Derby Property Summit, hosted by TV’s Declan Curry. With delegates expected from London, Birmingham and Manchester, for the first time, I’m told, Derby will be at the heart of the UK’s property community.

The idea for such a landmark event came as a result of massive demand at recent Derby Embassy events held in London and Cannes. Both were oversubscribed, with people sitting in the aisles. The Derby Embassy has become a unique and ubiquitous tool in our investment promotion kitbag.

When we launched our first embassy event, at the House of Commons five years ago, many scoffed at the idea and I was even called in to try to explain the concept on Radio 5 Live, even as invitees gathered in Parliament’s Central Lobby. What was a city like Derby trying to achieve with such an idea and what were all those city ambassadors doing there?

Since then, embassies have been held in prestigious locations, not only in the West End, the City and Canary Wharf areas of London, but also in Birmingham, Cannes and, this year, for the first time, Monaco. The idea is simple. Derby is not on the investor radar by right. In truth, there are no groups of investors gathering in Mayfair, plotting their entry into the Derby market. To generate inquiries and interest we first have to attract their attention and we need to go to them in order to do this.

That’s why we host events in attractive locations, incredibly professional and slick, giving investors an opportunity to meet Derby’s ambassadors and to hear our story and the endorsement of existing investors.

It is a simple ideal but it works a treat. An example of this is the fact that the developers of Derby’s first city centre office scheme in a quarter of a century, the striking Friar Gate Square, came across Derby at our Cannes embassy event. So next week, in some respects, the embassy is coming home.

The property summit is not an embassy as such but the atmosphere and energy will be familiar, as will the stellar line-up of speakers. The whole event will be seamlessly knitted together by Declan Curry, the TV and radio business journalist. Contributions will include a keynote address offering an international perspective by Courtney Fingar, who edits the Financial Times Foreign Direct Investment magazine. Courtney travels the world advising locations seeking investors and investors seeking locations, reminding us that competition for investment today is very much global.

The national picture will be provided by UK investment supremo Adam Breeze, whose objective analysis of who’s up and who’s down in the cut-throat city stakes is respected by many who count. I predict the star of the show to be the energetic and inimitable Jackie Sadek, Chief Executive of UK Regeneration. We first came across Jackie at MIPIM in 2012, and by 2013 she was addressing our Embassy in Cannes announcing a major investment in the DRI site. I suspect delegates will be thrilled by the plans Jackie will reveal on the day for the Nightingale Quarter.

The local perspective will be led by Derby City Council Chief Executive Adam Wilkinson. Under Adam, Derby has taken a massive step change in its regeneration, from the stunning Council House refurbishment, through to the arrival of Webhelp TSC, to the new arena and velodrome now under construction, only yards from Pride Park Stadium itself.

Finally, there will be two panel sessions, chaired by Declan Curry, which will promote debate on issues from the keynote presentations. The property summit is a sell-out and I believe Derby’s regeneration is really getting noticed beyond our regular horizons, so look out for the sequel in May 2014.

Published in Business Weekly, Derby Telegraph on Wednesday 8th May 2013.

By John Forkin.

I was lucky enough to spend some time over the Easter weekend visiting the very impressive Format Festival. Now in its sixth edition (apparently festivals come in editions) this biennial event is now the UK’s largest (and leading) photography festival.

If you missed it then you missed something really special. Held in 18 locations across the city, from the Quad and Museum and Art Gallery to the innovative St Werburgh’s Chapel or Chocolate Factory (yes, Derby has a chocolate factory), Format attracted some 100,000 visits. The festival’s global profile is wide-reaching.

This year, the Financial Times raved that Format “rivals its international peers” and the New York Times described it as a “celebration of Derby’s status as the birthplace of mass production”. It’s not every day that Derby receives endorsement in such places.

Yes, I can hear some of you say, all very nice but what does Format have to do with the business of the city? My contention is that events such as Format are the business of the city.

Charles Landry, a director of Comedia and an international authority on cities, analysed places ranging from the megacities of Sydney and Shanghai, to those on a more human scale – places such as Freiburg and Ghent. Landry quotes an interesting longitudinal survey that shows how employment choices are being made by young educated people, the very people needed by business to drive innovation.

Apparently, 15 years ago 80% chose a job or company before choosing a city. Today, it has more or less reversed and 70% now choose the city first before choosing the job or company within it. This might at first seem surprising, one would have thought that the recession had created a buyers’ market.

However, ask any employer seeking high-skilled, educated, knowledgeable workers and, having previously believed they would have a surfeit of choice, they will share a slight shock at the low number of applicants and how few candidates were appropriate. Today, I met with a company having to bring engineers in from Spain, for example.

Landry identifies that cities have, what he calls, both “hard” and “soft” infrastructure. Hard infrastructure includes the built environment, transport provision, energy and communications. Soft infrastructure would include networks, business support, education, culture and leisure facilities.

Landry argues that successful cities in the future will need to excel in both the hard and soft varieties. Put simply, if there is a 21st century war for talent, then it is of a global nature and the much sought-after knowledge workers hold the whip hand. They will only want to work in cities that are great places to live.

In other words, in places having a reputation as vibrant, cultural hubs where there are interesting experiences to be had. Cities like Derby cannot be complacent and must continue to develop a rounded offer.

This is where not only Format but also initiatives such as the Pride Park Arena, with its velodrome, and Riverlights Olympic Pool fit. Anyone who saw Tony Robinson’s gushing endorsement of Derby on his Channel 4 Walking Through History programme will know that Derby’s reputation as a centre of industrial excellence is secure.

What is important now is to complement this by continually enhancing the city’s reputation as a place to live. If the New York Times can see this, then is it not time that we did too?

Published in Business Weekly, Derby Telegraphy on Wednesday 10th April.

by John Forkin.

Earlier this month, Rolls-Royce announced a profit of £1.4 billion. In 2012, the company’s star performer was civil aerospace – that’s the design, build and selling of the large engines that power the Boeing and Airbus fleets. The Rolls-Royce world headquarters for civil aerospace is right here in Derby and today the company employs 13,000 people in the city, making it the single largest private sector employer in any city outside of London.

Rolls-Royce operates in global markets and this means that Derby’s workforce competes globally. A profit of £1.4 billion and an order book of £60 billion says we are doing pretty well. Rolls-Royce has been central to Derby’s business health for more than 100 years and its success has helped to shape the knowledge-based, high-tech economy we see in Derby today.

I believe that Derby is on the verge of an economic renaissance, a renaissance firmly rooted in that knowledge-based, high-tech economy, but one that can only be achieved if we continue to work – business and commerce, together with the public sector and the wider community – to grasp that opportunity.

Back in 1717, the world’s first factory was built and today the Derby Silk Mill is part of a Unesco World Heritage Site. Only last month, leading think tank the Centre for Cities produced a State of the UK Cities report for 2013. It listed Derby as in the top 10 cities for innovation, along with places such as Oxford, Cambridge and Aberdeen.

We have been an innovative, high-tech city for 300 years. Today, 12% of Derby’s workforce is employed in high-tech functions – the highly skilled, knowledge-based roles needed to win global competition. This means there are more high-tech workers in Derby than in the whole of Nottingham, Leicester and Stoke put together!

HEROtsc on Pride Park

Derby has been a hub for attracting national and international investors. Rolls-Royce moved here from Manchester in 1906. Toyota came from Japan in 1989. Bombardier from Canada in 2001. Westfield came from Australia in 2007. Only last week Paris-based Webhelp Group invested heavily in the city by purchasing HEROtsc for £75 million.

These are big names, each is number one or two in their sector globally and Derby should be very proud to be home to the jobs they bring. Just as important, maybe more so for the future, are the SMEs – the small to medium-sized businesses that in fact make up most of Derby’s employers. There are thousands of companies in this category, some of whom are in the supply chain for the big names, but many are not.

The Derby area is packed with knowledge-based businesses, not only in trains, planes and automotive, but also in sectors such as composites, oil and gas, professional and creative. Companies such as Katapult, EPM Technology and Sydac may not be household names but they represent hundreds of other entrepreneur-led and very talent-thirsty businesses. These companies are at the top of their game, providing services to international customers.

The challenge for Derby is to continue to attract and retain these businesses, as well as the talent they require and the wealth they create. We also need to get better at developing our own talent. That’s why in 2005 the city launched its 15-year master plan to attract £2 billion of investment to modernise the city centre and create 10,000 jobs.

Back then, Derby was leaking much of the wealth it created to Nottingham, Birmingham and Sheffield. This was costing thousands of jobs and employers found it difficult to attract the right talent. We had no choice but to go out and sell the city as an attractive location for investment. So far, an impressive £1 billion has been achieved. This has brought in many city developments such as Westfield Derby, which created 3,000 new jobs.

• More than 500 new city centre hotel beds, the first for 30 years
• The start of new city centre office buildings, the first in 25 years
• The University of Derby and City Council Business Incubators, hosting hundreds of new-start companies
• Quad and Cinema de Lux, bringing film back into the city centre for the first time in over a decade.
• The stunning Derby College Roundhouse and Joseph Wright buildings bringing thousands of students back into the city
• The refurbished rail station and brand new bus station, both hosting 12 million people each year.
• The completion of the inner ring road, after a 35-year wait.
• The revival of the historic Cathedral Quarter, now home to many new, independent and quality businesses.
• The magnificent new Derby City Council headquarters, a real centre for civic pride and, now under construction, the sports arena and, soon to start, the Olympic swimming pool.
• Finally, many new homes are to be built in Castleward and on the Derbyshire Royal Infirmary site bringing residents back into the city centre.

I know that not every single one of these developments will be liked by every single person, but that’s not their point. To be fit for purpose a city has to be fit for a diverse range of people and Derby wasn’t doing this. These developments have created thousands of jobs for Derby people and we have finally started to retain some of the wealth that we create.

For example, in 2005 Derby was 63rd in the national retail league table. Today, we are 28th. In 2005, the city was attracting 16 million visitors and by 2012, 25 million. The additional spend is more than £121 million each year. In other words, over half a billion pounds extra has been spent in Derby since Westfield opened in 2007.

Together, the changes they are bringing to the city are generating a new confidence, greater desire and ambition. So, why do I believe Derby is on the edge of a renaissance?

First, the wider economic environment is moving in our favour. The collapse of the financial markets in 2008 shifted the economic paradigms towards production. Countries can no longer rely on financial services to drive growth. Politicians talk about the need to “re-balance” the economy. This has created a space and renewed respect for manufacturing, in my view, long overdue.

Second, Derby’s economic make-up fits this re-balancing. Intense global competition means that developed economies can no longer compete on price. There is no future in taking the low road. Our future is in quality, added-value, knowledge-based activity – jobs present here in Derby.

Thirdly, Derby is getting its act together. Our public-private partnerships are second to none and the Derby Renaissance Board contains political, business and community leaders committed to improving the city. We are a city in transition but we no longer punch below our weight. But to take full advantage of this positive environment Derby’s greatest challenge is to better develop its own talent. This requires a step change in our education system, especially at primary level.

Frankly, it breaks my heart to hear how in the past we have languished near the bottom of national league tables in this respect. It is depressing and unacceptable. This, possibly more than any other city, should be a place where young people can look forward with some confidence to better prospects, whatever their background.

I recently hosted a visit to Derby by a writer who is recognised as a global thought-leader on cities. His name is Charles Landry. In his book The Art of City Making he says: “The spirit of city making, with its creativity and imagination, is more like improvised jazz than chamber music. “There is experimentation, trial and error and everyone can be a leader, given a particular area of expertise”. If city making really is like jazz then we need the Duke Ellingtons, Dizzy Gillespies and Nina Simones to step up and play us into the future.

Published in Derby Telegraph on Monday 25th February 2013

By John Forkin.

TS Eliot once famously wrote that April is the cruellest month, though I sometimes wonder if he should have said February. There are days this month when it almost feels like spring – sunny, with temperature in the low teens before sudden hard winds blow us back into the snow flurries of a cold, dark snap.

Uncannily like the economy, really. It has been five years since the party finished yet investors, businesses and consumers are still not sure whether to stick or twist. Interest rates remain at rock bottom, unemployment has remained reasonably steady, shares have risen and by all accounts businesses are sitting on massive cash reserves.

And yet little stirs in the economic woods. The growth that government desires remains frustratingly elusive. Governments’ instincts are generally to try to kick-start economies by launching (and usually re-launching) a basket of various initiatives.

The Coalition is no different, yet, to date, all seem to fall on fallow ground. Any confidence generated by talk of rebalancing the economy, the Olympics, quantitative easing, regional growth fund or transport infrastructure has been suppressed by the noise of austerity and a fear factor.

It seems a legacy of the crash is that we cannot (or are unwilling to) deal with what appears to be a contradictory message – the need to invest and tighten belts all at the same time. It’s easy to knock governments for not delivering the miracle of growth but a recent experience got me thinking about how businesses are stuttering in their approach too.

You would think that in this flat economy, customer would be king and businesses would have evolved a heightened sense of getting it right when a customer is sitting in front of them wanting to buy. On my recent experience you’d be wrong.

A minor accident resulted in our car being written off and we found ourselves as surprised customers seeking a new car one Saturday across the city’s dealerships. I accept we weren’t buying a luxury marque, just an entry-level city car but, nevertheless, had expected to come across some hunger and desire for our business in these tough times. Our experience ranged from the sublime to the ridiculous, and in one case was actually ridiculously sublime.

Two dealers were fantastic, two simply awful and the others somewhere in between. In two showrooms we received a friendly, bespoke, non-pushy, jargon-free and informative customer experience. Needless to say, by the end of the day, we had purchased from one of these.

This contrasted with one showroom with a wonderfully stylish reception and a phone that never stopped ringing during our 15 minutes there, though no receptionist ever actually appeared to answer it. Add to this the salesman who couldn’t actually show us the car we were seeking. Beats the internet then?

In another, we felt we had walked into a convention of sales blokes all of whom had fancy sales-bloke puffa jackets but none of whom seemed to be able to tell us anything about new cars. A touch of 1970s Life on Mars?

A third managed to provide an empathetic customer experience until they eventually confessed that they didn’t actually have any cars and moreover couldn’t get any until Easter. Monty Python eat your heart out. The automotive sector is one of the world’s most important economic activities. In the UK alone, it employs more than 750,000 people and is worth some £50 billion.

The investment and skills that go into the technical research, design, production, supply chain development and clever marketing is phenomenal, which is why today we have such a fantastic choice of stylish, reliable, quality cars.

This makes it all the more frightening that the sale of each single car often comes down to the simple human interaction between a receptionist, salesperson and a customer. I suspect my experience could be repeated in so many other economic sectors. Surely, in a recessionary economic wasteland, customer service becomes more, not less, important.

TS Eliot worked in a bank, so he could have told you that.

Published in Business Weekly, Derby Telegraph on Wednesday 13th February 2013

By John Forkin.

Last week’s administration of Jessops, the camera retailer, is yet another in a long line of high street names to collapse since the 2008 credit crunch. Hundreds of companies employing tens of thousands of people have simply disappeared in what can only be described as carnage in the retail sector.

In the past year alone, household names such as Comet, Pumpkin Patch, Game, Peacocks, Past Times, Blacks and Julian Graves have gone. All of these stores had a presence in Derby.

In the case of Jessops, 192 stores face closure with the loss of 2,000 jobs, ten here in Derby. These apparently small numbers soon add up to a significant loss of employment across every town and city in the country and many families have been impacted.

While each retail failure has its own reason (in the case of Jessops, the growth of digital photography in the smart phones we now all own has been identified as the main one) there is no doubt that the ongoing recession, together with online shopping, is a force reshaping the UK high street forever.

In other words, no place is going to be able to recreate their high street of 2007, either in numbers or type of retailers.

The problem is most marked in smaller towns, those identified by investors as secondary centres, some of which now face vacancy rates of 30% and many of which are being abandoned by the few investors still in the market. Derby is an interesting case, a rarity in fact, as our retail footprint has actually grown since the crash.

In 2007 Derby was classed as an “average major centre” and its retail spend potential was £414 million, meaning the city ranked as a lowly 63rd in the national league table. By 2012, the city was classified as a “quality regional centre” with retail spend of £535 million and a national ranking of 28th. The reason for the increase is of course the £340 million investment by Westfield and the opening of its new shopping centre in late 2007.

It is hard to remember now, but Westfield Derby was planned and built when the economy was at the top of its longest boom in history and Derby’s main challenge was to retain more of the wealth it was leaking to competitor locations. This was costing the city thousands of jobs.

All retail businesses faced a crunch in 2008, with closures in Westfield and all across town, though at the time no one predicted that we would still be witnessing regular closures in 2013. There was considerable controversy here as to the impact of Westfield on the rest of the city but it is my view that many businesses, large and small, were going to struggle as the recession took hold.

Derby’s response has been to see the city centre as having a broader purpose than just shopping – a vibrant city in which to live, work and play, if you like. During the recession years, Derby proved remarkably successful in attracting developments from the many new hotels through to QUAD.

These, plus support for initiatives such as the Cathedral Quarter, means Derby has managed to keep its head above the water. The city vacancy rate today at 12.7% is just below the national average, for example. An additional £600m spent in the city over the past five years is difficult to argue, but it is crucial that we continue to retain local wealth as well as attract more worker and visitor spend.

A new department store, more premium shops and central residential projects can grow the local spend. The worker spends can be increased via the city’s suits-on-the-street strategy with their associated lunchtime and post-work spend. In 2012, Derby attracted only £17 million of this, compared to £32 million in Leicester and £34 million in Sheffield.

Derby City Council’s Regeneration Fund is facilitating the first serious city-centre office construction in 20 years and we should be aiming to at least double our worker spend on the back of this. Derby’s tourism spend has been growing and by 2012 accounts for £51.3 million. This is more than Leicester (£38 million) but only half that of Sheffield at £102.9 million.

The city council’s velodrome and Olympic swimming pool, a refurbished Silk Mill, new Joseph Wright gallery, together with successful cultural and sporting attractions can drive this up too. Jessops is a reminder that the good old days are not coming back, that customers are ruthless and successful cities will be the ones that adapt.

Published in Business Weekly, Derby Telegraph on Wednesday 16th January 2013.

by John Forkin.

The essence of marketing a city is simple – find positive things to say and then go out and say them. The tough bit is identifying potential investors and figuring the best mechanisms for getting that message through.

We all know that, over the past five years, much has changed in Derby but does living and working here lead us to sometimes taking that change for granted?

It is always an interesting experience to see Derby through the eyes of others and the visitors we host at Marketing Derby, the majority of whom have never been to the city before, provide that opportunity.

Last month, we hosted guests from Barcelona and this made me reflect on how far Derby has come. Firstly, the very fact that representatives from Barcelona wanted to visit the city is evidence of that journey. They had expressed an interest in Derby as a place to invest, attracted by our hi-tech credentials, following an analysis that had compared UK cities.

We promote Derby as a central, compact, hi-tech, business city, with a fantastic quality of life. This was the reason behind their visit.

They were interested to hear how Derby has been a hi-tech leader for 300 years – hosting the world’s first factory in the 18th century, leading the global railway revolution in the 19th and aerospace in the 20th. But we also stress that we are a city with a plan, a city in transition, a city that is rapidly changing itself to retain a greater proportion of the wealth we already create. Barcelona understands this.

You can achieve a surprising amount in a 24-hour whistle-stop tour of the city, as our Catalonian colleagues discovered. As well as presenting to nearly 100 Marketing Derby bondholder businesses, they managed to meet key leaders, including City Council and Chamber of Commerce Chief Executives Adam Wilkinson and George Cowcher, and Sam Rush, the new Derby County Chief Executive, due to start in 2013.

They were stunned by the sheer scale of the Toyota and Rolls-Royce presence in the city and excited by the prospects for the new Global Technology Cluster. The outcome is real potential for economic links, including with the University of Derby as it develops its technical credentials and synergies with the city’s rail sector.

Derby is becoming a more confident place and hosting visits from investors from Barcelona helps banish doubts over whether we have something special here. Estates Gazette identified Derby as one of the best locations for potential property growth in 2013 to 2017. Of the top 20 locations, only Derby, Leeds and Edinburgh stood out from the usual south-east hotspots.

It was fascinating to listen to the Catalonian comments before they set off back to London courtesy of East Midlands Trains. They said that both cities had an “industrial soul” and described how Barcelona began its fundamental transformation in 1992, comparing it to Derby’s £2 billion masterplan, created 15 years later.

I’ll leave the last word to our Catalan friends: “We had seen the numbers but Derby was still a surprise, a well-connected city that is growing and very attractive for investment links.”

Published in Business Weekly, Derby Telegraph on Wednesday 12th December 2012.

by John Forkin.

Who is afraid of industrial policy?

The UK political establishment is apparently. You’d think that a country which has been gently slipping down OECD competitive tables for decades, has been in the economic doldrums for the past five years and, according to the IMF, faces a triple-dip recession, would be keen on defining its economic ambition and identifying how it hopes to achieve it, an industrial policy?

You’d be wrong. For 40 years or more, most national politicians break out in a nervous sweat at even a mention of the mere phrase, quickly reverting to tired scripts about how government can’t pick winners, the need for laissez-faire and obsession with level playing fields.

I have always been confounded as to why people seek power in order to do nothing with it once they gain it. It seems a strange comfort zone where perceived failure is best avoided by taking no risks at all.

A quick search for ‘industrial policy’ on the UK government website rather weirdly throws up ‘employment tribunals’ as its first hit. Broaden the search to ‘economic development’ and out pops ‘greener living’ and even more rather absurd, ‘Queens Honours List’.

Truth is, ever since the failed interventions of the early 1970s (think British Leyland), governments of all political hue have avoided anything with even the scent of industrial policy.

Meanwhile, countries across the world get on with defining their official strategic economic direction, ensuring that resources are corralled to support this as best they can.

Leading economies such as the United States, France and Germany are quite comfortable with defining their focus for growth, they have implicit and explicit industrial policies.

Carry out the same search function for Singapore as I did for the UK and you are soon directed to a clever and compelling ‘host to home’ strategy, which positions the city-state as a stable and trusted base in the heart of Asia.

You are then very quickly pointed to the Singapore Economic Development Board, an official body that plans and executes the said strategies. Of course EDB activity has attracted so many companies (including our own Rolls-Royce) as investors into that country.

This UK policy vacuum is relevant and impacts locally, as experienced here in Derby recently. First, under the last Labour government, Hitachi was awarded the £7.5billion Inter City Express Programme contract and then, last year, the Conservative / Liberal Democratic Coalition awarded Siemens the Thameslink contract.

Trains that could have built in Derby by Bombardier are now to be built in Japan and Germany. If you want to know what industrial policy looks like then I’m afraid it doesn’t look anything like that.

Instead of being apparently prepared to lose the UK’s only train builder maybe the government should have been attracting two more so as to build a healthy rail manufacturing sector? That’s what industrial policy might look like.

Again, here in Derby, the nationalisation in the 1970s of Rolls-Royce, plus its subsequent privatisation in the 1980s, is a classic (albeit accidental) case of industrial policy in action to which the UK economy and Derby economy massively benefits to this day. Maybe though, all is not lost.

Each government seems to have a maverick that gets it, someone who understands the purpose of gaining power is to use it to shape events. Think Michael Heseltine (intervention before breakfast, lunch and dinner), Peter Mandelson (market driven industrial activism) and most recently the current Business Secretary, Vince Cable.

I’ve written before about our meeting with Dr Cable in the summer of 2011 over the Thameslink issue. At the time I commented as to how uncomfortable he seemed that we, in team Derby, and not him as Secretary of State for Business, had jumped on a plane to Berlin to consult with the Bombardier leadership to ask what would it take to make them stay in the UK.

I was quietly delighted therefore earlier this year when Dr Cable, seeing a threat to automotive employment in the north-west, jumped on a plane to New York to meet with the bosses at General Motors and lobby (successfully as it turned out) to secure their investment.

Recently, Dr Cable finally came out and confessed he wanted a ‘new industrial policy’, one that puts manufacturing at the centre of our long term vision for UK plc.

Hallelujah!

The policy would put government muscle (investment, infrastructure, regulations, skills etc) behind high-growth sectors such as advanced manufacturing, life sciences and the digital economy – all sectors in which we excel but could do so much more in growth markets. Business bodies are unanimous in their welcome for the direction.
The political environment seems right too.

Recently the Public Administration Select Committee made a searing attack on the government’s lack of coherent, strategic leadership and produced a case on the need for a statement of national strategy focused on long term policy gaols. The collapse of the financial services golden goose makes this all the more compelling and indeed necessary.

After a 40 year hiatus maybe the time has finally come to detoxify industrial policy and for UK plc to join the club of nations with a plan?

Published in Agenda Magazine in November 2012