Date: Fri 16th October, 2009
Venue:
Number of Guests Attended: 85
Some 85 business people turned up at the Britannia Stadium in Stoke for Midlands Business Insider’s latest economic forum.
They heard a lively question and answer-based discussion chaired by Insider editor Andy Coyne and featuring North Staffordshire Regeneration Partnership boss Tom McCartney and Ian Dudson, chief executive of local ceramics firm Dudson Group, amongst others.
The debate ranged from the impact of the recession on the region’s economy, to ambitious regeneration plans for the centre of Stoke.
Speaking about the recession’s impact on the locally important ceramics sector, Dudson said: “Any business in ceramics today has to clearly understand its market. Some of the failures are where people tried to cover too many markets or didn’t have a deep enough understanding of the ones they were in.”
McCartney said regeneration plans are advancing, if slowly. “Some of our schemes have adjusted but the fundamental schemes have progressed. There is a lot of pressure on agencies who are trying to do things, people like AWM and the HCA. Budgets get cut and there has to be a re-profiling but it hasn’t really affected what we are trying to do,” he said.
Fellow panellist David Webster, chief executive of Hanley Building Society and chairman of professional services interest group Finest, called for an accentuating of the positive. “The area has seemed over many years to have lacked a focus of leadership and has almost developed a siege mentality,” he said. “We seem to spend an awful lot of time in this area analysing, scrutinising and having an autopsy on things that are bad rather than saying we have got a shed load of stuff that is cracking.”
Andy Greenhough, director of enterprise and employer engagement, at Stoke on Trent College, said it is working hard to help raise skills levels in the area. “The number of ‘Level Two’ employees who have come through the college in the last year has doubled and we’ve seen an active development in employers gearing their workforce up, hopefully for the upturn,” he said.
Read the full debate in the December issue of Midlands Business Insider.
