Last week the Prime Minister visited the Bombardier factory in Derby to lay out our plans to secure growth and prosperity for the Midlands. He, along with the Chancellor, George Osborne, addressed issues such as employment, innovation and skills. Our long term economic plan is helping the Midlands to reaffirm its manufacturing status in the heart of the UK.
The Conservatives must win the General Election to ensure we secure the additional £34bn of funding in the Midlands by 2030, creating 300,000 more jobs in the engineering and manufacturing sectors. In South Derbyshire our unemployment is incredibly low and these extra, high quality jobs will see us strengthen further and move closer to our goal of zero unemployment. Brilliant news for school leavers and workers alike.
This increase in funding will also aid our ongoing aim to ‘reshore’. We have many businesses who use overseas suppliers because they cannot source their required products in the UK and we are looking to support local businesses to bring this manufacturing back to the UK and restore our historic industries. We have such a dynamic range of businesses, covering the rail industry and its supply chain; motor manufacturing; supplies for the coal and energy industry; high quality food processing as well as many more specialist firms who could all benefit.
Bringing job seekers with the right skills together with suitable vacancies is essential if our economy is to continue to be successful. We have made incredible progress already, and now need to do more, which is why we have introduced the new initiative with Local Enterprise Partnerships. It is shortly to begin being trialled in Birmingham, where the LEP will make and operate a central database of all job vacancies and, with 100 new job coaches, help to train people and equip them with the necessary skills to succeed and fill these positions. This will remove some of the many barriers job seekers regularly face, like the never ending list of websites to check and means those looking for work can find it much more easily. We are hoping to see the same scheme rolled out into Derbyshire soon, centred through our growing LEP, D2N2.
We are also supporting businesses from another angle; by investing £5.2bn in the local infrastructure, improving road and rail networks across the Midlands, helping to speed up the movement of people and products. This is crucial for some of our local employers such as Toyota and JCB who are well known for utilising the ‘just in time’ manufacturing method.
Building on this expansion of local infrastructure, we are looking to take inspiration from Derbyshire’s rail heritage and the forthcoming HS2 project by creating a specialised local college in the Midlands to make sure that our young people gain new and specific skills for working in the industry. The college will be a centre of excellence and the only one of its kind in the UK.
Innovation must be allowed to thrive, which is why we are encouraging local universities and colleges to partner businesses to research and develop new products or improve on existing ones. We are also working on a new and exciting project bringing together local universities with the British Geological Survey to create a national hub for energy research, based in the Midlands.
All in all the Midlands is a great place to live, work and raise our children. Our long term economic plan has already laid a firm foundation which the additional funding and projects can only build on. In May the choice is stark, choose our competence with the economy or return to chaos.