Is the Spending Review a road map to growth or a recipe for greater taxation to come?
As the dust settles on a Government announcement which spells out how much and where our money will be spent until the next election, we’ve canvassed the opinions of people in the know.
Northern Lights is Business Crack’s podcast offering you the chance to hear directly from those in business, in all sectors, across Cumbria.
Each month Business Crack’s Nigel Thompson is joined by a member of the county’s commercial community to talk about stories in the news and gain an insight into their lives.
Today we’ve heard from four people in a special edition of the podcast dedicated to the aftermath of the review to see how it might affect you.
”It’s actually about providing reliable energy here that we can use as an attractor for private investment in other sectors,” Dianne Richardson, the chief executive of Britain’s Energy Coast Business Cluster told the podcast as we discussed the implications a new small scale nuclear plant could have for Cumbria.
“Jobs not just in nuclear, but in other energy hungry industries as well. And that really benefits our local economy. We’re too dependent on the government at the moment. We need private business in here and this is one of the enablers for it.”
Business consultant Peter Fleming works with a variety of organisations looking to develop in a rapidly changing world.
“ Power is a big part of their budget, particularly looking at tourism and hospitality,” he told Northern Lights. “I’ve been working with a client who, over the last six years, have seen costs increase by about 40%.”
Suzanne Caldwell, the chief executive of Cumbria Chamber of Commerce said her overall impression of the review was ‘largely positive’ but she had some worries about how the government planned to pay for the projects set out.
“Businesses have already been hit very hard with the national minimum wage and employers NI earlier in the year and we really can’t keep kicking businesses and expecting them to be ones to pay for this and deliver growth,” she said.
Elsewhere the chancellor confirmed the government’s ambition to create a ‘defence industrial super power’, something Jayne Moorby from Ulverston-based Oxley Developments said was to be warmly welcomed but with certain caveats.
“ Investment in innovation was another key theme that came out of the Strategic Defence Review last week and we know that it’s SMEs that deliver that innovation into defence supply chains,” she told the podcast.
“So what we would like to see coming next out of the defence industrial strategy is more set aside content for SMEs with hard targets for SMEs working in defence supply chains and directly with MoD.
“We need to ensure that all of our communities benefit from this level of investment and the way to do that is to retain value within our local economy. So we don’t want all of this investment to leave Barrow on a Thursday night and drive down the A590.
“We want that to stay and the way to achieve that is to either build small businesses into defence supply chains locally or to employ more local people in the large organisations.”
Tourism enjoyed a mixed benefit from the review.
While bus fares capped at £3 was welcomed by our guests we heard calls by Kate Nicholls, chief executive of UK Hospitality, for the government to ‘bring down the cost of doing business’ adding that a forthcoming business rate reform should see a ‘maximum level of discount applied to hospitality businesses.’
“ I think the objective is to make Cumbria the place to be, not just to work, but to live, rest and play,” Peter Fleming said. “That can only be a positive thing for the county to draw more people into the area to help us then obviously employ them and build our businesses as well.
The debate will continue and we’ll bring you more details as the effects of the review are witnessed in Cumbria over the coming months and years.
Listen to the podcast above and it’s also available on:
Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/gr/podcast/northern-lights/id1808909640
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/2TTsD4pIPEMW4GEpxaEmyH
