In Focus: Central perk
As Peter Kay might say if he were interested in these matters: “Birmingham city centre as an enterprise zone? What’s all that about?”
A plan put forward by the Greater Birmingham Local Enterprise Partnership to nominate the city centre as an enterprise zone is either inspired or hare-brained. For once I’m keeping my powder dry until we know a bit more about the reasoning behind it.
But let’s think it through. In his Budget chancellor George Osborne challenged LEPs to nominate areas that would benefit for enterprise zone status. Such areas - there are to be 21 around the country including two in the West Midlands - will benefit from fewer planning restrictions and, more importantly, employers basing themselves there will get tax breaks. Such zones in the past have created success stories such as the Merry Hill shopping centre.
There obviously needs to be a debate about the best location for one of these zones. But let’s remember that their raison d’etre is to create jobs. Getting the property market moving and attracting inward investors is also a consummation devoutly to be wished but ultimately jobs is the clear goal.
There is an argument that if you boost a city centre it helps to stimulate the city as whole, creating jobs for people from a wider area who will commute in.
There’s certainly some truth in this but there are also some flaws in the argument.
Firstly city centre jobs tend to be office-based. Nothing wrong with having healthy professional and financial services sectors of course. Developing the city centre could also create jobs in areas such as retail and leisure and then there would be all the additional jobs in construction and the service sectors.
But it would do little to create jobs in manufacturing, where many of them have been lost in this part of the world.
My other main concern is that by boosting the city centre you are missing the opportunity of regenerating an area that more drastically needs a helping hand. People often talk of the ‘Detroit effect’ where you have a prosperous ‘downtown’ and affluent outer suburbs - where the city centre workers live - but the areas in between remain deprived.
There are signs in some of our large cities that this is starting to happen. In the case of Birmingham the regeneration of Longbridge will help that part of the world and the successful development of Fort Dunlop has shown what can be done on brownfield land outside the city centre. But much more needs to be done to bring other areas up and I wonder whether an enterprise zone wouldn’t be better placed in, say, Hodge Hill or Lozells than in the already prosperous city centre.
But although I’ve got a few nagging doubts about the city centre EZ plan I will be very happy to be proved wrong. If this is being used as a way of building on the fine work done by Birmingham City Council’s Waheed Nazir and others in re-thinking the Big City Plan masterplan in light of the current economic climate, and if it helps to get development going again, then I’m not going to be complaining.
But let’s not forget a city is made up of lots of areas and not just a ‘square mile.’
Any comments? Andy Coyne, Insider
