This is our latest update following the Joint Committee’s meeting on 29 March 2019.
We have endorsed an updated Delivery Plan which is the live action plan that will deliver our Productivity Strategy and allow us to track our performance in achieving our aspirations. The Plan will continue to be updated as projects are delivered and programmes progressed. It has taken a huge commitment by partners to get the Plan to this point – it is wide and diverse in scope and details current and planned activity. It is broadly divided into:
- ‘core offer’ – of programmes to deliver business support and employment and skills
- ‘enablers’ – including housing delivery, transport, and other infrastructure essential to support economic growth.
- programmes of activity (our ‘opportunities’) specific to the HotSW area.
The first iteration of the Plan was endorsed by the Committee in the autumn of 2018 and covered the ‘opportunities’ which were most advanced at that stage:
- Digital (photonics)
- Advanced Engineering (marine and nuclear)
- High Value Tourism
- Farming, Fishing and Food.
This second edition has updated the content on the opportunities set out above and has been expanded to include:
- Creative
- Big Data
- Aerospace
- Healthy Ageing
- Defence
- Construction.
The Plan will be refreshed in six months time to show progress and to reflect development linked to the Local Industrial Strategy and other policy agendas.
The Local Enterprise Partnership (LEP) has led the development of the Plan and its delivery is the responsibility of both the Joint Committee and the LEP convening and commissioning work through a wide range of partners.
Following the HotSW Housing Summit in September 2018, we established a Housing Task Force to work with Homes England to develop a holistic approach across the HotSW to promote quality housing growth in support of increased productivity. Government support is essential to address blockages to growth and allow our economic potential to be realised.
At our March meeting we agreed recommendations to pursue an area-based package of measures to accelerate housing delivery and to include:
- resourcing of a strategic delivery team to bring forward development propositions by providing additional officer capacity to supplement the thin officer resource in the constituent authorities.
- a major infrastructure fund to unlock sites and accelerate growth
- a small schemes liquidity fund to bring forward stalled small and medium-scale sites.
This package of measures will now be used to engage with Government and its agencies, including Homes England, to try and secure a bespoke deal for the HotSW area. Our plans and proposals are ambitious and we hope that the Government will respond positively. However, we recognise that our approach doesn’t fit within the known parameters of ‘deals’ that the Government may ordinarily find acceptable but we feel that it is worth pursuing as other initiatives have not managed to tackle the problems that we have identified.
|