London Mayor Boris Johnson
I would put the statistical likelihood of a damsel in distress being rescued by a senior West Midlands politician on his bicycle as being about the same as winning £45 million on the Euro Lottery. However, if anyone has other views on this possibility, please feel free to contact me.
The fact is that West Midlands folk like their cars and, as far a I can make out, an executive vehicle automatically confers executive status no matter how lacklustre the individual in question : so whist I’ve encountered few cycling politicians hereabouts, I’ve encountered plenty of lacklustre ones.
The result, unsurprisingly, is a lacklustre region as demonstrated by a recent report for the West Midlands Regional Assembly and Advantage West Midlands (AWM) on the problems of the region’s economy, which boasts the highest unemployment levels in the country. Could the Longbridge debacle have happened any where else I wonder ?
When I suggested to a local politician that his council officers would do well to get on their bikes to arrive at a realistic view of the amount of empty property, derelict sites and, indeed, unutilised planning consents assigned for so-called employment land in their area, I could tell that this didn’t go down well.
I might have added, of course, that some of his colleagues would be doing the region a favour if they followed Norman Tebbit’s advice, and got on their bikes in search of alternative employment. I mention “Stormin” Norman because my reference is to Conservative-controlled local authorities, or the Regressive (some might say “Retarded”) Right.
For “regressive” – even “retarded” – is precisely the description I would give to much economic development and planning policy for the West Midlands Region. In short, I would suggest that the region is 25 years behind London in implementing transport policies to support sustainable regeneration in the Major Urban Areas (MUAs)
Moreover, I seriously question whether most senior decision-makers, whether in the private or public sectors, ever use public transport, let alone their bicycles. Indeed my overwhelming impression is of a region of car-driving executives semi-detached from the real world.
A case in point concerns the release of additional land for employment outside the MUAs as part the Revision of the West Midlands Regional Spatial Strategy process. This process, incidentally, has created unprecedented levels of speculative land-banking in the region, which have only been dampened by the present “Great Recession”.
Now when I worked in the corporate property business during the late 1980s and early 1990s, it was widely accepted that those companies who had embarked upon ambitions development schemes, for new headquarter buildings and the like, were amongst the most likely to hit trouble.
In the West Midlands, this lesson was borne out again only yesterday, when Swedish company Eriksson announced the loss of some 700 hundred jobs from its glossy new offices just outside Coventry, which had been developed with the support of AWM, and were used by them as an argument for additional employment land designation in the region during the WMRSS Phase 2 Revision Examination in Public earlier this year.
Even more annoying, this kind of regional policy is dressed up as sustainable ! So I was relieved yesterday to encounter a plain-spoken and un-reconstructed motorist from “The North” as a consequence of separate diversions to our mutual journeys : his to avoid a traffic jam on the M5, and mine to avoid mud and pot-holes on a country lane.
Frankly, this experience was even better than being rescued by Boris Johnson, for I was able to regale said individual on the opportunities for demand management, whether with regard to roadspace, energy use or land banking, as well as the economic competitiveness, not to say social and environmental, benefits thereof, as Londoners have long known !
