Wolverhampton Business Week: City with 'swagger' looking to the future
Wolverhampton is a city 'with 'swagger' as confidence surges amid a £3.7 billion surge in investment, business leaders have been told.
West Midlands Mayor Andy Street hailed the city as part of a 'trailblazing' West Midlands he was determined to take to the top of the UK's league table of regional economies.
Speaking at the keynote breakfast event of Wolverhampton Business Week, he said: "Within this city there is a new found confidence and swagger that tells a story. It has a brilliant industrial history which is being reinvented."
And he said a partnership between the public and private sectors was driving new development in the city.
He was speaking to more than 200 invited guests from business and the world of politics at the GTG centre in Wednesfield.
But he warned that the ambitions of Wolverhampton and the wider region relied on plugging the skills gap, enabling companies to find the young recruits with right skills they needed in order to grow. Mr Street said securing skills levy cash to address the region's training and education needs was a key element in his current negotiations with Whitehall for a second devolution funding deal.
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Event host Steph McGovern, taking a morning off from her role as BBC Breakfast TV's business presenter, also heaped praise on Wolverhampton, comparing it to her home city of Middlesbrough for the 'resilience' of its people after coming through tough times.
She also joked she had done her bit for the city as her stand-in on the BBC Breakfast show during the morning had been Wolverhampton-born Sean Farrington, someone she tipped as a future BBC business editor.
"He's got a cracking Wolverhampton accent to boot," she added.
Steph later tweeted: "Such a buzz in Wolverhampton - fab to hear about latest investment/growth plans. This city has got swagger."
Also speaking at the event, a senior director from the world's biggest property advice company said Wolverhampton was "changing people's perceptions" as it worked to encourage new developers and investors in to the city.
Gary Cardin is part of the high-powered team from CBRE recruited by Wolverhampton council to help draw up an ambitious 10-year plan for the regeneration of the city. "This is not a fanciful prospectus," he said. "It looks at the current realities of the market, at viability and at what will work."
The city is currently undergoing £3.7 billion of investment, with a new railway station, new homes on the former Royal Wolverhampton Hospital site, the Westside leisure development, new offices in the city centre, a redevelopment around the canalside area, the £100m Springfield construction campus and even a new retail market, as well as the revamp of the Mander shopping centre.
Change, he said, "is not going to happen overnight", but Wolverhampton had impressed him as a "proactive, dynamic city".
It had suffered from underinvestment "for a good many years", said Mr Cardin, but schemes like the Westside leisure development in the city centre and the successful i10 office scheme were showing it was undervalued, making it attractive to investors who could see its value as the 12th biggest city in the UK.
And Philip Leech, from Westside developers Urban & Civic, said interest from restaurant groups, cinema chains and hotel operators for the scheme had been "beyond our wildest dreams".
The operator of the scheme's multiplex is likely to be revealed before Christmas, with working starting on the £50 million scheme early next year.
He said investors saw there was 'pent-up' demand in the city. "They have done their research and believe they are going to be really successful here."
"We have had the top name brands in the UK knocking on our door, quite frankly."
Mr Leech also praised Wolverhampton council and its officers, saying they had been ambitious about their plans but were also determined "to make it happen".
Keith Ireland, the council's managing director, said: "We don't make promises we can't keep. If we say it's going to happen, it will happen and we will do all the things necessary to make it happen."
