Welcome by Councillor Izzi Seccombe, Leader of Warwickshire County Council

Welcome once more to Warwickshire Means Business. Many of you may have attended the Skills for Employment conference this morning (Friday 6 March).  A huge part of our upcoming work is to ensure that our young people are leaving education and training with the right skills to enter the workplace.

This morning, representatives from the worlds of business and education met to discuss how we can bridge the gap and ensure that our young people can enter the workplace with all the skills they need to make a positive impact.

One of the areas of work that we are focussing on is giving young people the opportunity to start work as an apprentice.  Next week, 9-13 March, is National Apprenticeship Week and we will be hoping that many businesses look at the benefits that having an apprentice brings, which include increased productivity, higher staff retention and ensuring a skilled workforce for the future. In Warwickshire hundreds of organisations are realising the benefits of apprenticeships, five of which are featured in this newsletter.

In our last edition, I said that the Coventry and Warwickshire Local Enterprise Partnership was the best performing area outside London in attracting inward investment.  The partnership will be attending the MIPIM real estate show next week, meeting a vast array of businesses and potential investors as we seek to continue the outstanding upward trend. We will be using this opportunity to talk to potential investors to promote the new Creative Quarter in Leamington, which includes digital media companies who focus on games development, digital design and publishing.

As you will see from our economics blog the Warwickshire Outlook, there’s good news for the UK manufacturing sector which seems to have started the New Year strongly, with recent surveys produced by the CBI and the manufacturers organisation EEF suggesting a strengthening of the order books and the majority of manufacturing companies confident about future growth activity. 

In other news, I was delighted that the Secretary of State for Transport, the Rt Hon Patrick McLoughlin MP, visited the site of the new Kenilworth Rail Station recently.

The new Kenilworth Rail Station is part of a major rail enhancement scheme designed to encourage economic regeneration between Nuneaton and Leamington Spa.

Finally, you can read about how small rural enterprises have been using £200,000 of funding to expand and take on more staff, how roadshows in the north of the county are helping small businesses start up and how Thrift Week, like Small Business Saturday, is pointing people in the way of  independent, local  businesses.

This is just a taster of what is inside - I don't want my welcome to have to carry a spoiler alert! - but I hope you will all see that Warwickshire means business whether you are a company director or an apprentice, or whether you work for a large corporation or your own small enterprise.