Chamber shares benefits as it relishes big opportunities for region

Plans for the biggest offshore manufacturing facility in Europe and the announcement that Hull will be UK City of Culture for 2017 gave the area a massive lift towards the end of 2013.

Dr Malcolm Joslin, 2013 chamber president, said: “The recent progress for the Able Marine Energy Park has been widely welcomed as a step-change in opportunity for the region and the announcement that Hull will be UK City of Culture for 2017 has prompted many people to revise their perceptions of the area.”

He added: “This gives us a number of challenges, in skills, financing and infrastructure for example. I know our chamber members are united with the rest of the community in their desire and commitment to respond and deliver.”

The organisation saw a 62 per cent rise in pre-tax profit to £170,727 in the year to the end of September 2013, compared to £105,266 the year before.

Turnover rose by almost 11 per cent to £3.1m, up from £2.8m.

The chamber said that attendance at its networking events rose again in 2013 to over 6,000.

Dr Joslin said he believed there had been real progress in response to Lord Heseltine’s challenge to show unity across the region.

The Tory peer worked in the Hull and Humber area last year to oversee a new plan for economic growth after authoring a report which recommended stripping Whitehall of control over some £60bn of Government spending covering areas such as housing, infrastructure, transport, skills training and back-to-work programmes.

Lord Heseltine said the money should be made available to local areas to bid for and spend as they see fit.

Earlier this month, he admitted the Government could go “a lot further” in implementing his plan to devolve power to the regions after only making a third of what he asked for (£20bn) available over a five or six-year period.

In the chamber’s annual report and accounts, it said: “His
(Lord Heseltine’s) very well-received report “No Stone Unturned in Pursuit of Growth”, which
highlighted many recommendations for growth built around greater localism, was a concept we have championed for some time.

“Indeed the Government nationally adopted many of his recommendations in principle, albeit with a much smaller budget than his Lordship would have wished.”

The chamber said the campaign had led to initiatives such as the City Deal coming to the Humber for the first time, which offers policymaking freedoms and some budgets which may assist businesses locally, including the Growth Hubs idea to help businesses to find the advice and funding they require.

But the chamber added that Dong Energy’s £800m investment to build new office and warehouse development in Grimsby’s Royal Dock and the Able Marine Energy Park at Killingholme provided the region with the ‘best opportunity for many decades’ to reshape its own destiny as a region around the river Humber as the ‘Energy Estuary’ of the future.

The chamber said that it hoped Able’s development would offset the “economic blows” of a further round of redundancies at Tata Steel in Scunthorpe and complement the replacement of Kimberley Clarke by Wren at the refurbished factory at Barton-on-Humber.