Chamber of Commerce chief Paul Bassi wants big showcase project for Birmingham
Oct 16 2009 by John Cranage, Birmingham Post
Birmingham needs a “big win” showcase project to help it claw back ground lost to Manchester and London, the new president of the city’s Chamber of Commerce and Industry said yesterday.
Paul Bassi, officially installed at the Chamber’s annual meeting in succession to previous president Bridget Blow, said developments such as the rebuilding of New Street Station which will put Birmingham firmly at the heart of the national rail network would be important boosts to its image.
Mr Bassi, who has taken office pledging to shake up how the Chamber does business, was joined yesterday by Jaguar Land Rover public relations director Simon Warr as one of the organisation’s two vice-presidents.
Mr Warr, aged 42, is board director for communications and public affairs at JLR, a post he has held since February 2007.
A West Midlands CBI Council member, he previously worked for Ford of Europe and headed Japanese carmaker Mazda’s global communications team in Hiroshima. He said he would “contribute almost 20 years communications experience and an existing profile with various media and local authority figures” to the post.
Mr Warr joins Dr Christine Braddock, principal and chief executive of Birmingham Metropolitan College, who was appointed last year, as vice-president. He said yesterday that Jaguar Land Rover’s lead in research and development and in developing new low-carbon automotive technologies and materials needed to be replicated throughout the region’s manufacturing sector. Collaboration between companies and the region’s universities would produce developments that would “pull through” the system and help to create engineering jobs.
Speaking at a press conference yesterday, alongside Mr Warr and Ms Braddock, Mr Bassi and Chamber chief executive Jerry Blackett agreed that Birmingham and the wider West Midlands had failed to state its case for big investment projects effectively enough.
“Manchester is better at it than Birmingham,” Mr Bassi conceded.
While agreeing that Manchester had a globally-known brand in Manchester United FC, something that Birmingham lacks, Mr Blackett said: “I am not sure that the story about Manchester stacks up and matches the hype.
“We have assets like Jaguar Land Rover and Cadbury here in the West Midlands but we don’t sell ourselves enough and we have to be better at telling our story.”
He pledged that with a General Election looming, the Chamber would “work remorselessly to ensure that candidates for all parties understand what needs to be done for the region.”
Mr Blackett said the West Midlands needed more say in the big infrastructure projects run centrally by bodies such as Network Rail and the Highways Agency. “These agencies work to a central mandate and there is not enough bottom-up influence on budgets,” he said. “If we here cannot sort out things like transport it is because we don’t have the levers to pull.”
Birmingham also needed to do more to exploit its closeness to London, in terms of transport and communications as well as taking “some of the over-heating” of the London economy.
