Celebrating business in the Black Country

I attended the annual Black Country Chamber of Commerce (BCCC) exhibition and awards day in Wolverhampton. I have been a member of the BCCC for two years now and they are the most dynamic and active Chamber I have come across. My father started his business hauling coal from the Black Country around the West Midlands, so it is always good to be amongst the business people of our historic region.

Guest of honour was Lord Digby Jones who chaired a question time panel event that included Chamber President Peter Matthews, Francis Maude MP and Patrick McFadden MP and Minister for Business, Innovation and Skills.

Digby Jones, always worth listening to, warned the audience that more businesses go under on the way out of a recession than on the way in. Risk factors include over expanding and over trading when times start to feel better. Digby cautioned all those present to manage their companies really tightly as this severe downturn starts to recede.

Francis Maude stated that although Governments cannot make businesses successful, they can certainly stop them being successful. There are a lot of chamber members who would certainly agree with that, from bitter experience born of the last few years. This government has piled taxes and regulations on to business that defy belief.

Pat McFadden had quite a big build up from Digby and Peter Mathews. According to them he has done a good job for the business agenda locally and I have no reason to quarrel with that view. It was disappointing then that he used his speech to set up a series of straw men to misrepresent Conservative Policy. Apparently we believe the state has no role to play in helping business out of the recession and we were against the re-floating of the banks last autumn. Not so, on either count, of course.

There was much discussion about skills locally and bank lending during the Q&A session. On skills, if the national university graduate levels applied in the Black Country we would have 40,000 more graduates.

Francis Maude confirmed that what was needed to boost bank lending was a loan guarantee scheme of a larger size than currently available. £50 billion of underwriting has been the Conservative policy since the banking crisis hit. But the recovery has to be built on strong balance sheets. Peter Mathews agreed that the business case has to be made; it is no use to expect banks to engage in the same sort of high risk lending behaviour that got us in to this mess, to get us out of it.

Finally we are on the map. A representative of Ordinance Survey Maps presented the new map of our area showing the Black Country. Congratulations to Peter Mathews and his team for bringing this about. As Peter says, if somewhere isn’t on the map you don’t go there.

Photo: Left to right, Peter Mathews, Lord Jones, Margot James, Francis Maude, Mike Bell