“We need to better sell our region” is now a common refrain I hear in my conversations with business members, senior leaders and politicians on an almost daily basis. It was a key talking-point at the Festival of Flourishing Regions, the Devolution and Growth event, and the recent Mayoral Hustings that we held.
Implicit within this statement is the fact that we have much to be proud of. And of course we do; The West of England has an impressive innovation track record, attracts significant private sector investment, has a strong talent pipeline, and is an attractive destination for businesses and workers looking to relocate.
However, The West of England has not provided government with a compelling proposition for investment and growth, and this presents a missed opportunity. Not only for our region, but the wider UK economy too.
We need public and private investment so we can drive inclusive and sustainable growth. We need this to help tackle pressing issues that our region faces, which include unaffordable housing, poor transport connectivity and a skills gap.
But we also have a positive offer to government: when the UK is desperate for economic growth to help pay for public services, our region has the underlying strengths and dynamism to help generate the ideas, businesses and income to deliver this.
We need investment to take advantage of the many opportunities our region currently has, which include advances in green energy and AI, advanced manufacturing, tech and defence.
In May, we will have a new Metro Mayor for the West of England. Business West wants to work with them to bring our region to the top table of combined authorities. We will then have greater access to support and powers to make our region grow.
The next Mayor must work closely with the business community for our region to meet its potential. We would like them to focus on:
Following the 2024 General Election, our new government offered deeper bespoke devolution deals to ‘Established MCAs’ in housing, transport, planning, innovation, investment, trade and skills to regions across the UK. These regions will receive a financial boost to tackle issues that hamper growth. However, the West of England, which received a Best Value Notice in 2024, missed out.
Earlier this month, the Government removed the West of England Mayoral Combined Authority’s Best Value Notice. The next Mayor now has the chance to reset relations between the Combined Authority, Whitehall and Westminster. This is a critical step towards raising our region’s profile and making the case for investment.
It’s worth noting that The West of England Mayoral Combined Authority is the only combined authority in the South West. It could therefore play a major part in unlocking more investment throughout the whole of the South West region.
We believe the strength and visibility of our region is greatly enhanced when our Metro Mayor works shoulder to shoulder with our business community. This means collaborating on joint challenges and demonstrating the economic strength and potential of our region. This will help set out our narrative to central government, making the case for investment.
The West of England is strongest when it works in concert with its neighbours and peers, as Business West knows from its close collaboration with partners, including the Growing Together Alliance. Thinking beyond our geographic boundaries will allow us to make better use of the people, places and assets of our wider region.
The Growing Together Alliance’s Connected Clusters report and Lord Harrington’s Report into FDI highlighted how city regions collaborating, rather than competing, with their peer city regions will reap dividends. This approach will support the West of England in landing further investment in the UK.
Closer to home, local businesses want to see North Somerset brought into the fold. We have long-urged local leaders and central government to do this. North Somerset is part of the West of England economic geography, with deep ties in terms of employees, visitors, and students travelling across the border every day.
The West of England’s public transport is the poorest performing of any comparable city region in the UK. Our transport is unreliable and inefficient, and it contributes to over a third of the region’s carbon emissions.
As I have said many times before, better transport connectivity is fundamental to improving economic growth, social mobility, cohesion and is essential to achieving net zero targets. We need transport that connects people to places and allows all residents to feel the benefits that our region has to offer.
We have seen encouraging progress in this area since the Mayoral Combined Authority implemented the region’s Joint Local Transport Plan. This demonstrates how our next Mayor and constituent authorities can deliver impactful major infrastructure projects when there’s a shared ambition and a willingness to work collaboratively and deliver at pace. But we need a step change in our regional connectivity and the plans and investments to deliver this.
We hope to see our next Mayor work with Network Rail, and later Great British Railways, to take forward ambitious plans for Mass Rapid Transit within our city region that will transform how people who live, work, and visit our region travel within it.
We also hope to see the next Mayor champion commuters’ needs by improving bus services in our region, as well as improving the commuter experience through green and active travel investment.
The next Mayor should also consider how our two key international gateways, Bristol Airport and Bristol Port, can be better accessed by visitors, workers, and supply chains. This is important if we want to maximise the impact that they have as major actors of regional economic growth.
Our region is facing an acute housing crisis. Average house prices and private rent rates have both outpaced national averages, particularly in Bristol where rents have increased faster than in any other part of the country. This makes it harder to attract and retain talent and means workers are spending more on housing costs, rather than spending in the local economy and benefiting fully from rising wages.
We require long-term, joined-up, strategic planning to help overcome the significant challenges of our region: that means space for our future homes and communities, new growth opportunities for businesses, and scaling infrastructure across transport, energy and other areas to enable sustainable growth.
The West of England’s housing delivery strategy, introduced by Mayor Norris early in his term, sought to unlock land for development, accelerating and increasing housing delivery in the region. However, house building has not kept up with demand.
We have also seen a growing shortage in employment space, including a lack of office, warehousing, industrial and collaboration space. This inhibits businesses’ ability to grow and expand. Bristol currently has the highest office rental costs of any UK city outside of London.
We therefore ask that the next Mayor develops and implements a Spatial Development Strategy. This should include unlocking underused land around key transport hubs and potential grey belt sites in the region. The strategy will also allow the Mayor to raise a Mayoral Community Infrastructure levy to fund strategic infrastructure, alongside issuing Mayoral Development Orders.
These potential new powers must be used to invest in unlocking future growth, not just as a tax on, the already high costs of, development.
Major initiatives, such as Bristol Temple Quarter and the Brabazon Development show the art of the possible when the public sector and private sector work together. These schemes are providing homes and offices that are well served by public transport and show we can deliver high quality new places that new communities can be proud of. Brabazon, a 380-acre brownfield site, is based on the principles of a 15-minute neighbourhood. It aims to become the most sustainable new urban community in the UK.
The next Mayor has an opportunity to improve living standards across our region by showing leadership on tackling our housing crisis, working in partnership to apply innovative solutions at the pace our region needs.
Innovation is a critical factor in driving economic growth. It gives businesses in our region a competitive edge, provides jobs and solutions to emerging regional and global challenges.
Our region’s strength in innovation and technology has meant that we are host to five of the UK’s Unicorn Start-Ups, with over fifty university spin-out companies. We attract a high level of technology and intellectual property-related deals. Our innovation spend per head is actually higher than London, due to the strengths of our universities and growth businesses .
Business West works in close collaboration with the Combined Authority to advance innovation, ensuring that its initiatives are consistent with the Innovate UK Action Plan. We are committed to ensuring that sectors receive the necessary support and that critical challenges are addressed.
We were disappointed that the West of England has not been selected for further devolved responsibilities. We therefore call on the Mayor to work with Central Government on turning the West of England into a Trailblazer for innovation accelerations. This will allow local leaders to develop bespoke innovation support for our region, delivered in partnership with UK Research & Innovation.
Through our Futures West Foundation, and key partners such as the Brunel Centre, and the Productivity Institute South West Forum, we can support the Combined Authority in strengthening its evidence base around our regional innovation, research and development strengths. This data can help provide tailored growth and scaling support, and opportunities to showcase our region’s innovation strengths.
It has been six years since the West of England first took over responsibilities for adult education from the Department of Education. The aim is to better tailor local skills provision to local learners and employers’ needs.
We’ve been encouraged by the Combined Authority’s engagement with the Local Skills Improvement Plan (LSIP), which Business West oversees. LSIPs bring together employers, education and training providers, and other local stakeholders, to set out the key priorities and changes needed to ensure post-16 technical education and training better aligns with business needs.
This year, the West of England has been given funding and responsibilities for providing a new Youth Guarantee for 18-21 year olds, which could be a really powerful programme for tackling youth unemployment and giving young people the skills and confidence to reach their full potential in the world of work.
Business West believes future Mayors should work with colleges and providers to take on greater devolved responsibilities in this area, leveraging additional funding to ensure regional skills and training provisions meet employer needs of today, and the future.
We need to prepare the workforce for booms in construction, major infrastructure programmes and the net zero transition. The new Mayor will also need to ensure the effective transfer of AI technology expertise into UK workplaces. This is essential if we are to improve the UK’s workplace productivity.
The West of England region is an increasingly attractive destination for private sector investment. Our regional ecosystem has great assets and a wave of opportunities on our patch.
For example, we have the potential to become a leader in green energy supply with major developments in the wider region including Floating Offshore Wind, an EV Gigafactory and Gloucestershire’s potential to become a nuclear hub.
We also have strong technology and advanced manufacturing sectors, with recent major investments in health tech, via Epic Systems, Artificial Intelligence, via Graphcore, and additional investment in aerospace and defence from Airbus and others.
Our region’s prosperity depends on attracting future investment from both domestic and international companies. This will create the jobs, technologies and tax revenue needed to sustain our economy and public services.
The Government is committed to kickstarting economic growth, and the Combined Authority has mapped our region’s opportunities, threats, blockers and enablers. We now have a Strategic Economic Plan, Local Industrial Plan, and lately a new Local Growth Plan.
We call upon the new Mayor to work with the business community, which is ready and willing to collaborate, to make these plans happen. Our business community, with its abundance of insight and expertise, can help leverage the investment that we need.
The West of England industry produces £7.4 billion in exports, which boosts our regional economic productivity and is a key indicator of our region’s economic vitality. The next Mayor will face a tough geopolitical climate with the potential of increased tariffs and trade barriers.
Our Quarterly Economic Survey indicates that the region has faced sustained decreases in international trade, and this will hamper local growth ambitions. We would like to see the Mayor launch a tailored export growth programme to help support our regional businesses in reaching their full export ambitions.
The next Mayor is prime-placed to take a leading role in showcasing our region to key investors across the world. We encourage them to establish a partnership relationship with the Office for Investment to maximize the attractiveness of our region as a key investment destination.
In summary, we want a Mayor who is ambitious, bold and focused on delivering, and who is visible, both in London and on the world stage.
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