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Local businesses quiz Gloucestershire MPs


By Ian Mean Gloucestershire Chamber Director


We have six members of Parliament in Gloucestershire and I invited them all to talk about matters of business, and Brexit, of course. Three of them came - Gloucester’s Richard Graham, Alex Chalk from Cheltenham and Stroud’s newly elected MP, David Drew. To be honest, to get three of our MPs in one


place at one time is going some, and I was very pleased they were able to come to the newly refurbished Bowden Hall Hotel at Upton St Leonards. My agenda as director for Business West in the


county is simple. I try to concentrate on being the voice of business on key issues and currently those are: the skills gap, affordable homes, Brexit and the future of Gloucestershire - the so called 2050 plan. I asked our MPs to set out the issues as they affect business in their areas. Richard Graham said: “We have got fabulous diversity of business in this county and a huge amount going for us. We should start off by celebrating what we have got - we have got pretty good infrastructure. We must build on our strengths. We have considerable strengths in aerospace - every Typhoon in the Second World War was built in the Gloucester Aircraft factory. In my view, it is time that we recognised what the future of this airport can be as a stimulant and allow it to expand.” Low taxes will encourage


what he called 'Glospreneurs'. David Drew said: “For people


outside they probably don’t realise that Stroud is a very important manufacturing centre. The biggest problem we have in Stroud is the lack of employment land. It means that a third of our workforce migrate out every day-that is not acceptable in the world of sustainable development. We have got to develop more jobs.” He said he had a meeting with Network Rail and First Great Western and wants a half hourly train service now that the


12 insight JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2018 L-R: Richard Graham, MP for Gloucester, Alex Chalk, MP for Cheltenham and David Drew, MP for Stroud


redoubling of the line had taken place. It is ridiculous that we have to wait and hour- sometimes two hours to get to London.” He is quite right, of course. “We need a decent transport infrastructure-


‘To be honest, to get three


of our MPs in one place at one time is going some’


that will only happen if we improve our rail and buses and dare I say it, have some extra money for roads. We are moving towards the notion of the electric highway. That is important in Stroud as we do also look towards Bristol and that sub regional development in terms of the electric highway is going to be really important to us. So, I would like to see some cabling alongside the M5 so we can genuinely bring some more vehicular movements between Bristol and the south of this country.” Alex Chalk highlighted business rates as a key issue for local business, and this is a big issue that has caused confusion in local business. He said that nationally, 600,000 firms are being taken out of Business Rates altogether. “Apprenticeships mean that 18- year olds in my constituency have a genuine choice – should they go to university and weighing up if they think


it is worth the investment or should they go straight into an apprenticeship.” Alex said in Gloucester there had been up to


£500m of investment and what he called “a powerful sense of direction” but in Cheltenham that was not the case.


I agree wholeheartedly in what Alex says. Cheltenham has hitherto been in the slow lane in terms of innovative ideas for investment and innovation in the town. So, how was Cheltenham going to prosper, he


asked? “If we are genuinely going to tackle some of


the social problems where you have a big gap between rich and poor, you have to have solutions and my solution is to create more opportunities for young people. That is why I am so passionate on cyber. What is our big thing here in Cheltenham? GCHQ is getting £3bn of public money over the next ten years. In Israel, the equivalent of GCHQ sits cheek by jowl with their equivalent of Cambridge University - Ben Gurion - and they have created a cyber-park in the middle of the desert. I said to George Osborne this is what we should be doing in Cheltenham. Set up a cyber innovation centre with some of the finest minds moving out of GCHQ to nurture small business.” Now, of course, the gFirst LEP - the local enterprise partnership - have won a £22m bid towards the building of this new cyber park in the west of Cheltenham. In the UK currently, cyber as a business is


worth £22bn - quite staggering but a real indication of why this new centre in Cheltenham will be so important to the county’s economic future. Alex said that improved infrastructure in the


county was important to “make these economic opportunities fly.”


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