| St
Helens is on the threshold of an exciting and prosperous
future after winning funding of more than £13m
to boost business activity in the Borough. COMMENT looks
at the impact of the Local Enterprise Growth Initiative.
Britain may once have been known as a nation of shopkeepers
but we are now in danger of falling behind our competitors
in Europe and America in terms of the number of successful
businesses in
the country.
In 2003 just 6.4 per cent of Britons were engaged in
entrepreneurial activity, compared to 11.3 per cent
in the US. The situation is improving, but nationally
there is a long way to go.
The Government recently announced that as part of its
neighbourhood renewal programme it would be turning
the spotlight on raising levels of entrepreneurial activity
in under-achieving
areas. Recognising that by encouraging enterprise and
business local authorities could revitalise and develop
their economies, the Government encouraged them to bid
for financial support from a
multi-million pound fund that would enable them to do
just that – the Local Enterprise Growth Initiative,
or LEGI.
LEGI is a joint programme between the Treasury, the
Office of the Deputy Prime Minister and the Department
for Trade and Industry and will award £126 million
over three years. More than 50 bids
were submitted for the first round of funding earlier
this year and St Helens was one of just ten local authorities
– and the only one in the North West – to
be successful, securing a £13.4million boost
for local businesses.
The Council worked in partnership with St Helens Chamber
to develop, and now to deliver, the bid, which, says
Aidan Manley, Head of Regeneration at St Helens Council,
will have a huge impact in the Borough.
“St Helens has been under-performing in terms
of the number of businesses we have. We really need
to turn that around. LEGI gives us a fantastic opportunity
to do that and we want to make sure that it has a real,
lasting impact.”
LEGI has three key areas of focus which will help to
reduce the ‘enterprise gap’ in St Helens
– a shortfall in the number of small businesses
and rates of self-employment compared to the national
average. These are: increasing entrepreneurial activity,
supporting the growth of local businesses and attracting
inward investment to the area.
Kath Boullen, Chief Executive, St Helens Chamber, explains:
“This is all about growing our local economy and
creating more jobs and wealth and the best way to do
that is through enterprise and
business, whether that is helping people to start their
own business or working closely with existing businesses
to provide support to help them grow and prosper.”
The Chamber is recruiting an extra 30 members of staff
to help to deliver LEGI projects. Projects focusing
on raising entrepreneurial
activity include Enterprising St Helens, which is aimed
at encouraging children and young people to think about
business, and Get a New Start, which will assist people
not currently in work to look at options including work,
self-employment, training or volunteering. A specific
project will concentrate on growing social enterprise
in the Borough, providing support at the concept and
business planning stages.
The Chamber also aims to help 230 new businesses per
year to start up through a combination of awareness-raising;
advice and
training; start-up grants and business support, including
accountancy support. There will be
targeted, bespoke assistance for women who are currently
under-represented in the self-employment figures for
St Helens.
Support for existing businesses is an area in which
LEGI funding will be crucial.
Kath Boullen says: “One of our aims is help local
businesses to win more business, whether that is from
each other, from the public sector, or from bigger national
or international corporates.
“We will be helping businesses to develop their
awareness of procurement processes, for example, so
that they can meet pre-tender and tendering requirements.
“This funding gives us so much flexibility in
terms of support. If a supplier needs to get ISO accreditation
we can set the ball rolling – we can say this
is how you do it, this is the training you need and
we can now pay for it too.”
One of the new schemes is Business Advocates, an idea
imported from a successful model in Boston, USA, where
they are known as Streetwalkers. The idea is to have
business advisers out on the streets, visiting local
small businesses and offering advice and guidance on
any business issues.
“This will help to sort out some of the many problems
businesses may encounter day to day. That might be something
like getting their bins emptied, or dealing with bureaucracy,
it could even be questions on health and safety or employment
law. Whatever the question, the Business Advocates will
be out and about helping
businesses to find the answer and they will help us
to find out what kind of support small businesses need.
We won’t just be sitting here waiting for the
phone to ring, we will be out there every day,”
adds Kath Boullen.
Together with supporting new and growing businesses,
the Chamber also intends to inspire local owner-managers
and business leaders by developing a specific programme
to include
a range of formal and informal development opportunities.
“This is not just a case of offering a range of
training courses,” says Kath Boullen.
“This is about doing things that will be exciting,
interesting and innovative. We aim to bring in high
profile speakers and arrange events that will be genuinely
inspiring.
“Hopefully, it will also be a great networking
opportunity. Small businesses often don’t have
the chance to look at their leadership development and
if you are running a business it can be isolating so
we want to bring lots of businesses together to benefit
from this programme.”
Attracting investment to the Borough is a further aim
of LEGI and a new integrated marketing campaign will
help to stimulate speculative investment, however, Aidan
Manley believes that
this will involve more than simply increasing the number
of companies coming in to the area.
“Inward investment is very important but we also
need to make sure that we can keep our graduates and
young people here so we want to bring in the right opportunities
for them – that means having the right facilities
for them, having the right property product and having
support from local schools, colleges and Higher Education
institutions.
“We have to get the infrastructure in place to
support business. For the first time in a number of
years we are on the verge of bringing forward some significant
property development in the town
centre and other locations.
“We will also be addressing local transport and
we will be working with Merseytravel and bus operators.
We have great flexibility with LEGI, for example if
we need a new bus route to help people to get to work
we can use this funding to get one started before it
becomes commercially profitable to do that.”
Both the Chamber and the Council agree that the changes
will not happen overnight.
“This is a long-term vision. What’s really
exciting is that we now have what amounts to a 10-year
plan and at the end of it we will no longer be an area
that needs special help,” says Kath Boullen.
Aidan Manley adds: “This is a massive opportunity
to give St Helens businesses and the people of St Helens
the boost that they need so that in ten or even five
years’ time we are as competitive as anywhere
else. It is a great challenge but it is one
that both the Council and the Chamber relish.”
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