 I'm delighted to welcome you to this fantastic venue on behalf of the University of Nottingham's Institute for Policy and Engagement. My name is Stephen Meek. I'm the director of the institute. The institute was created to help connect research from the university, connect it with policymakers and with the public. And I think this event, I think we've certainly got policymakers and I'm pretty sure we've got the public and all points in between here and this is the perfect event for us. We've got a stellar and substantial audience here which is not surprising. We've got a great event and I'm sure it will be a fascinating presentation and discussion. I'm not going to say anything about the report because I'm not really qualified to say anything about the report but I did want to offer a few reflections on it. The first is, and this is so typical of the work of the Resolution Foundation, is how it's an exemplar in how to present serious and often very complicated research and analysis in a really accessible and thorough way that doesn't compromise, doesn't dumb down, but tells the story. But it's just a brilliant narrative. It's a fantastic read. Second thing to say is a word that kept coming out, kept striking me from the report, which is serious. We're talking about serious challenges. We're talking about serious situations that the country is in and it's a situation that demands serious solutions. I think it's perhaps a reflection on what often seems a level of triviality in the way policy is discussed and considered at the moment where one month's borrowing figures being slightly above or below what was expected is suddenly transformative as if the issues that we're dealing with aren't issues that are 40 years or longer in the making. I think all praise for seriousness at the time when it's so often debate is trivial and debase. But even though it's serious, it's not a castle of despair. There's all sorts of solutions in them but they're serious solutions. They're not quick fixes or fantasy developments. Third thing I want to say is how fantastic this event is in Nottingham. Nottingham features quite early on in the report and it's for quite a grim reason. Nottingham has the lowest per capita income of any authority in the United Kingdom. That's pretty grim statistic as an example of the way this country is divided, the way wealth is so unequally divided. It's also significant that it's in Nottingham and Mel will talk more eloquently about this, I'm sure, but Nottingham has been in effect, sadly, the post of Charles for a failure to think seriously about local government and local finance by successive governments. But also it's great that it's in Nottingham because Nottingham is such a fantastic city with such potential, so much going forward, and deserves so much better. And then finally I just wanted to talk about the role of the university, as you expected to do my role. So first it's fantastic that the university, Greg, has been involved in the creation of the report. University's repositories of insight and knowledge collaborating on important pieces of work like this is so important. But also university is a part of the solution. If there are many solutions things need to happen that are identified in this report, universities are sources of high level skills as things that attract investment, that attract students, that attract people from overseas. Universities are sources of innovation, just picking a couple of the areas that are identified in the report. The university of Nottingham will do a huge amount of work on the green economy, particularly around green aviation, likely to be one of the manufacturing solutions of the future. But also the university and the work it's been doing, and I don't know whether John Gadget would or Mary and Doug are going to hear, but they might. The work that they're doing on fintech and the potential that Nottingham has to become a sort of fintech centre and thinking about the UK as a service economy and being proud of that. So anybody, I'll stop rambling now. I could drone off for hours about the report in a very poorly forward one, but I'll hand over to Greg after the investment. OK, so I'm going to be talking a bit about our report in the stagnation, kind of setting out the problems of economic stagnation in the UK. And I was going to headline some of our strategy of what we can do about it. Please take a look at the back if you want to put these out in about 15 minutes of a big on strategy. So what's the problem? We used to have growth in the country, and essentially we don't have so much of it anymore. This shows 10-year growth rates in GDP per capita. Up till around 2008 we were fluctuating between 20-30%. After that it can house pretty much crates. You might ask, why do we care about this? This is quite an abstract concept, fashionable to say. We see no care about it. This is what's happened to wages over the same time. We're all getting paid. I'm not less than we would have done if growth had continued. How much less? If growth would continue on the same trajectory as it had up until 2008, it would be 10,000 or 7,000 per worker per year, better off. I'm sure you're all agreeing, because 10,000 pounds a year, when a sexual is going up, that would have been very useful to have. The growth is the only problem that we have. We also have stubbornly high inequality in this country. We're the most unequal country in Europe. Inequality saw it in the UK in the 80s, and it's pretty much plateaued since then. A lot of people think inequality is always going up and up and up. It isn't going up anymore. It's a stage of a high level when it's looking up. It can go down. Why is this issue? The issue is that low growth and inequality combined is a toxic combination specifically for households on the lowest and then all incomes. In this chart, we are comparing incomes with four countries generally in the Netherlands, France, Italy, where if you go holiday to these countries, you might look around. They seem kind of similar to the UK, but it looks a bit like home. The secret is that they answer their lot, which is who we are. Unless, if you look all the way to the right, if you're among the highest income people in the UK, you're actually on par with people in the Netherlands, people in Germany, slightly better off. If you look at the middle, the middle of our income distribution, the middle in Germany are 20% better off. The middle in the Netherlands is 70% better off. These are big numbers. Often in the Netherlands, we're talking about a couple of percent. We're talking a whole fifth of the income. Looking at the lowest, always the left, looking at the lowest income people in this country, they're 27% better off in France and nearly 37% better off in the Netherlands. This is a serious difference in the extended square. Why is our idea of the way out of this? Essentially, we need a strategy. We don't need a list of policy things that we like. We need some rules that can help us in this. Serious is what it means. So three things. We need to get serious about growth. We need to be just as serious about reducing inequality. As we do that, we need to think about economic change as a way out of this. What do we mean by serious about growth? What's not serious is thinking there's a silver bullet, thinking we just need the right tax cuts or we just need the right policy and then we'll get back on track. Or thinking we need to get back to the past where we all used to make things and get to work in factories or we used to copy Germany and be a manufacturing powerhouse. It's not going to happen. What do we do now? We are a services superpower. We are the second biggest exporter of services in the world after the United States. And what stands out for the UK is the breadth of services that we look at and say. It's not just financial services, we've got business services, education, culture, technology. And these are the areas that if we want to get out of stagnation and start growth again, we can start growth. These are the areas that need to be instrumented. The Nuttingonshire economy largely reflects the national picture of dominance by services manufacturing. The structure is still very important. 84% of workers in Nuttingham work in some kind of service. And it includes the same as the National Library's early big sectors of health and education, biosciences, technology. So a strategy that focuses on investing in services is also going to bring a set of scientific and increasing productivity and disadvantages, making sure that any kind of strategy isn't just focused on the whole country. Talking about investment, there is no low investment way out of this. And that's exactly what we've been doing over 40 years. For the last 40 years, we have been the lowest investor in New Yorkshire. This is totally a investment, but any way you look at it, private investment, this is a investment with renewable layer outputs. We can get away with a couple of years of low investment. We can't get away with decades of low investment. This is what we need to discuss. We need to be investing in what we could have, in services, education, culture, things that we haven't compared to that. We also need to be just as serious about producing quality. Growth on its own will raise GDP or generally raise living standards. But it will, here, increase the quality. People growth disproportionately goes to people, the richest people in society. So if we want to share a great share of prosperity in this country, we need a strategy to reduce the inequality as well. This is a two-point strategy. Work, a good work agenda, and making sure that we have the strong safety net. So what is a good work agenda for a baby? Looking at nothing against, I think nothing illustrates the issue quite well. We have issues in nothing with both productivity and equality. The blue eyes here represent productivity per job for the worker. These are similar sizes. You see nothing quite right there below the national average. The red bars here represent the same. I think nothing is well below the national average. So investment in high value rather than service sectors is going to bring up a lot of the debt. But we need to be realistic on that. Everybody is going to be able to get a high value. Now everybody is going to be working in minus size. So we need policies and regulations that mean that there is good jobs available to everyone. They are well paid, they are secure. There has been a lot of progress over the last ten years. Almost all of the employment gains have come to the bottom in industry issue. This is something that we need to build on. In the same way, progress on the national level range has really made a good impact on our day. But is there just the amount of jobs that are going to be secure around a third of the lowest pay? So they are anxious about changes in their working hours that they might expect. So we recommend a right to a contract reflecting the actual hours that people work. Requiring the employees to give at least two weeks advantage notice of shift patterns and increase of sick pay to 65% of people get out of your own. We have to understand that not everybody is ever going to get the most of their income from the job market. There is always going to be a section of society that I think are the benefits. So we need to make sure that for those of you who want them, they are not being left firmly behind. This chart shows the value of employment benefits relative to earnings and how it has been for them. Instead of living for around 50 years, we need to make sure that if we want to share prosperity, we need to make sure that working-age benefits increase in livelihoods earnings rather than places that we know. Upgrading the state pension in exactly the same way we have paid for that around half of this. And we also need to renew the sharper stages of the benefits system. That means to ensure that they make the benefit cap and policies that are pretty much just pushing the lowest income price to find those things above the cheap. We also need to make sure that any gains that we make, living standards are not being wiped out by ever increasing-age costs. And to do that we need to build and that's not what we've been doing. This chart shows how we start for 1,000 inhabitants in lots of different countries. The three dots are 1990 red, 2010 blue and the 2020 in tier. If you look at France at the time, you can see the progress they've made from the blue to the tier from 2010 to 2020. They tell you to progress all the way down to the UK, but in a circle you've made no progress. We haven't increased our housing stock for the amount of benefits that we've had, and that's why houses are having costs so high. So we need to build sufficient scale, especially in cities, especially when people work, when the good jobs are what people afford to live, work. We need to build an adequate share of sub-market housing, so the lives of people can also afford a decent income combination. And we need to make sure that the benefit system properly covers housing costs. That means there's no more caps on the amount of housing support that's been done, especially if all the decent is done before. So I want to talk a bit about clearing up economic change as a way out of this. There's a lot of anxiety about economic change. A lot of people talk about jobs being lost to automation and thinking about AI. It's different to how it was before. Reality is stagnation. It's what defines the current times. Since the end of the eighties, this job is showing sexual reallocation to people moving in the jobs of different sectors. It's gradually been declining since the end of the eighties. This is just sexual reallocation. If you're a worker, people moving in the jobs of different sectors has to be declining, so why do we care about this? Because moving jobs is helping people to secure a higher wage rate, a higher wage rate for all workers. The bottom here is the median annual wage rate for all workers, and you can see how big that is with people moving in the jobs, and you can see where it's given to people in the jobs and sectors and the jobs in the regions. So the less this is happening, the less these bigger failures are going to be that are happening as well, and you can stagnate. But there are trade-offs, at least kind of strategies that I want to talk about a little bit today. He's very hard to believe. This is not as sharp as it should look. What we're basically saying is that the bars on the right, the high-collective sectors need to grow. We can't grow everything, so you need to grow the highest-collective sectors and financial services and information communication, like on social, you can't say it all. Manufacturing as well. But to do this, the size of the less-collective sectors doesn't need to train because we need to make capacity for the life of the sector. Things like accommodation and food services, which is very innovative. We spend more of our money relative to the rest of Europe on things like eating out, and it's cheaper relative to how those things cost. A good jobs agenda is going to raise the cost at the local aid label, which means it's going to raise the price of these industries in the line on local aid label, which means the price of things like eating out. We're going to have to do more plastic than that. But I've been very gloomy, very down-to-value, very carly, and I've told you you can't get down anymore. What's the price yet if we can achieve the strategy and achieve the aims that we have there? We're looking here at five countries that we typically think of the UK economy as being similar to those of Australia, Canada, France, Germany and the Netherlands. We're not saying we want to be as rich as the Americans. We're not saying we want to be as equal as the Scandinavians or something unrealistic. But if we achieve growth to the level that we can match income levels of these five countries, across the income spectrum in the UK, it would be a thing that would be summarised as being the same. That's great when we think we can do better. Just looking at inequality, if we can reduce our inequality to the point where our income shares matches these five countries, this is what we look back, the bottom quintile of the income distribution would gain a little bit more, the middle quintile would gain a little bit less and the register, of course, would lose a bit. That might improve things a little bit, but it's not going to be a deal. If we do both things, if we get growth back on track, if we reduce inequality to matching the income shares and the income levels of these five countries, the bottom quintile would be more than 35% that's rough, the middle quintile around 25% that's rough, and even a little bit for the richest, you might not think we care about your relationship relation, but we do. What does this look like in real terms? We've calculated it as an average of 8,300 pounds per household per year. I'll leave you there to think about what it's meant to be. I might like a grand. I can't give you that, I'm afraid, but what I can give you instead is Norasynia, who's going to tell us her reflections on what she's just heard and then also a little bit about the eased midlands free pool and what that is. Thank you. I'm not really sure if I'm worth £8,000, but we'll see by the end of the evening. I am an adopted daughter of Nottingham. I've lived here for 25 years, but I make no apology for my accent if some of you still think that, you know, it's a bit further north than here. A little bit about East Midlands free port. I don't know how much any of you know or don't know about East Midlands free port in essence. The free port is here to act as a regional catalyst for international investment, for jobs and improving skills, for innovation and for accelerating the region's journey towards 90. So the free port has three designated land sites. You'll be familiar with them. One is around East Midlands air port. The other is a track lift once we're per station and one is the south of Toyota on the A50. In total it comes to about over 600 hectares, which equates to about 1,500 football pitches. So we're talking vast space and vast scope and the investors that come to those sites and will be attracted to those sites will be getting a number of tax reliefs such as five years relief from business rates, exemption and stamp duty and three years relief on employer, national insurance contribution on salaries up to £25,000. So those incentives make our sites very attractive as a proposition for inward investors but they have to be the right investors who are actively committed to the social purpose of the free port. So if we have such a spin we will rigorously test this and if they don't pass then they won't get the tax relief and they won't be based on the sign out of the free port. So part of this process is also about ensuring that we don't displace businesses that are already here. We want new investment whether that's internationally or domestically. It isn't about shutting down one site and switching to the free port. This is genuinely about attracting new inward investment based on the country. So the investment in these inward investors coming to the site will also unlock our social payment so we will receive an uplift in the business rates that these sites generate from the treasury. In total that will come to over £1 billion over the lifespan of the free port which will reach about 25 years and we'll use this to boost skills, innovation, infrastructure projects and fund community schemes to make lasting meaningful opportunities for those living and working in the East Midlands. And it's important to say I think that it is a public-private sector venture. So we have six private sector organisations and our six public sector local authorities on our board. So just coming to Alex's presentation around a new national economic strategy for Britain and part of this is around ethos of the free port. So I think that we need to play to the strengths of the region if you want to look at economic growth and so we need to recognise the strength of East Midlands and the growth areas of the future. I think that we need to define generally what specialisms each UK region has and what they've been known for and then make every attempt to make that a reality and grow. And East Midlands has a fantastic story to tell when we were pulling together the strategic plan and looking at what kind of businesses we would attract to the free port area we looked at the rich heritage of skills and knowledge that we already had within this region. That included advanced manufacturing and green hydrogen production through our universities logistics and life sciences medicine food production and we have one of the best range of things as if you like of automotive and aviation sectors based within our East Midlands area. So we're already starting with a good base but we do need to make more of it. And where Alex was talking about jobs, skills and innovation then I think that any strategy needs to ensure that our workforce can reflect the requirements businesses now and in the future. So we have to appreciate I mean one of the, I was interested in what you were saying there about the roles that the East Midlands workforce were already in and represented in but we have to realise that almost 10% of our workforce are in roles that are expected to cease as we transition away from carbon intensive industries. So that means we need to look at what are we going to put in place to replace them hence looking at our advanced manufacturing and our green hydrogen opportunities. We have to also retain more highly qualified graduates in East Midlands and nothing of despite being home to two world class universities has a second lowest graduate retention of all the new case cities that have red brick buildings and we need to stop that. So when we talk about and Alex again is quite right we are a services industry economy and sometimes you have to have a catalyst for those services. So when we talk about bringing logistics and advanced manufacturing to the free port we are not just looking about what those companies do but also how they can export how they can grow so we need high quality people who can speak languages who can deliver legal services who have financial capability so there will be a wealth of both experience and skills that we will be looking for which then plays to Alex's points about we need to build houses to make sure that we keep them in the region that they grow their families within this region and we have a heritage of being able to deliver real careers with wealthy jobs to people in this area. Alex also pointed out that the East Midlands has lower levels of government investment than any other area in the UK and I think that the new may all combined authority will be a great step forward here but you know we need to be on a level playing field with the rest of the UK so great to see that the funding which is diverted from HS2 will be allocated to the Midlands in the north however thought needs to be given to how those economic levers are going to be deployed how they are going to be integrated and how they are going to support existing transport networks so the free port benefits from being at the real heart of the UK you can get to about 90% of places within the UK within four hours from the East Midlands so our transport and infrastructure networks are critically important so that people can move their goods around the UK and we can benefit from that so large scale projects need to be supported by government but any strategy also needs to consider is do we need for success like people skills and infrastructure in a sustainable way which moves the country particularly towards net zero and just a quick mention of jobs as I said you know there is a high proportion of jobs in the East Midlands which are going to be lost because they are already working in carbon intensive industries so that means we need to up scale our existing workforces to be ready for the types of new industries that we can attract to the region we are looking at how we transition towards a green economy at the free port we recently granted a £5.8 million grant to East Midlands net zero innovation centre which will be delivered by the universities of Nottingham and Loughborough we are looking at how we can address the availability of electrical capacity for development and low carbon projects particularly around the supply of hydrogen and we are seeking to champion decarbonisation of East Midlands airport through a green future study which we are doing so those types of jobs will be in to address some of the social mobility areas that Alex referred to and the role that East Midlands can play in that but the addition of the East Midlands combined authority then there is a great opportunity I think for the East Midlands to get back into stride again and actually make a critical difference in terms of economic growth so I'll leave it there Thank you very much Nora It's great to be here It's great to hear some words from Steve at the outset Alex setting the scene and thank you to Greg So colleagues shall I just explain the principle of policy adviser to 55 elected councillors I also then provide visible leadership to 7000 staff providing hundreds of service lines to support the major core city of this country so that's my role and I'm going to talk about the city and context it's economic make up the transition and some of the things that we're looking at in terms of moving forwards and importantly in terms of what's been said about both public in terms of East Midlands but also in terms of our levels of productivity clearly our mayoral combined county authority is part of the response to that so I'll sort of touch on that as well and just to say that if you live in Nottinghamshire, Derbyshire, Nottingham or Derby I will be writing to you because I'm the returning officer that will be dealing with 1.6 million electors to over there in terms of our approach our city boasts a rich history of economic success fuelled by globally recognised brands such as Boots and Experts a vibrant cultural heritage scene a diverse population two world leading universities an excellent transport infrastructure and a sporting price which all combines to enhance our national and level appeal however amidst our accomplishments we must confront the challenge of fostering growth that reaches every corner of our communities aligns with our values and true inclusivity Most of my working career has been in London and the South East I relocated to Nottingham four years ago to take this job I live in the Arboretum so I'm walking to work in the centre but many of you all know is one of the most deprived parts of the city so I see that every day in terms of that inequality that the city has is a service-based economy with over 85% of employment now concentrated in the service sectors as our incentive and traditional manufacturing is waned but in this place we find opportunities at the forefront of emerging technologies and industries such as create tech e-sports and life sciences and I want to shed light on the success of this transition and the future potential of the service sector in our city the strength of the sector and there are great opportunities to capitalise on our world-reading service activities within a globalised market With big brands such as Xperia and Capital One in the city Fintech has emerged as an important sector for Nottingham and provides a significant competitive advantage for our city On the theme of technology the University of Nottingham's Castle Meadow campus which has recently been opened up hosts the Digital Nottingham initiative which brings together academia and industry and communities on cutting-edge digital research and data practice Similar positive stories can be told for the life sciences sector which remains a great asset for Nottingham not least with the presence of Biocity just around the corner an award-winning incubator space that continues to nurture cutting-edge innovation within the city Of course, we must continue to support the world-class of big businesses that make a vital contribution to the city's economy today We also need to look into the future to identify new industries with the potential to generate inclusive jobs and growth in the years ahead The creative and digital industries have emerged as a key growth sector currently employing 7% of Nottingham's workforce and demonstrating five times the growth value added growth in the average industry in the city since 2010 Nottingham has experienced some of the largest employment growth in the sector since 2015 and the creative and digital sectors have clearly thrived in the city evident in the success of places like Slenton Market as a help for creative activity and support structures like Confetti are always achieved in creative technologies with their high-skilled jobs as well as the capacity the creative and digital sectors have the power to shape up in the future and address socio-economic challenges However, a common theme to unleash that full potential we must address constraints such as the availability of appropriate premises and the need for affordable work spaces Quality affordable space along with flexible spaces for co-working and networking is essential for this sector to grow As with other industries skills requirements are also critical competition for talent is now fought on a global scale we are not just competing with London access to universal talent in our city has proven to be powerful but as Laura has said demand for skills are still outstripped supply access to finance and support growth has also proven to be successful recent expansion of the create growth program funded by DCMS enabled us to successfully bid for resources that will support growing companies in Nottingham and Nottingshire helping them to secure innovation growth funding via Innovate UK but as we strive for economic success further long term investment in the sector will be required to realise the full potential of our region As a city we need to see the challenges we face generating a successful economy that all parts of our society can engage with and benefit from this inclusive and sustainable growth is what underpins our emerging economic plan for Nottingham this is not a plan we are curating it on behalf of Nottingham our city and I would encourage you to have a look at our website read the plan complete the online survey to give us feedback on the proposals finally I just want to touch on the leading point of the economic plan to the response which is a mayoral combined account authority it is only two years that the leaders of four councils got together to agree that we should go for it we are the only core city in the country without a combined authority or angrant part of the challenge is we have over 300 local authorities in this country and like it or not sometimes a government wants to move quickly in terms of investment propositions and dispens it wants to deploy they speak to the metro mayors they don't speak to 300 odd local authority leaders so we need to be at the table and that was the basis of the conversation between the political leaders in this part of East Midlands and we saw it this week that the minister signed the final bit of regulation which now means we do have a combined account authority breakneck speed to do that within two years is truly impressive so what will this do well it will mean that we get at least 30 million pounds a year to invest and to leverage and to borrow against which creates over a billion pounds of money Governments talking to us about 1.5 billion pound transportation pot that will be able to be deployed by the combined account authority and there will be lots more to come whenever you look at budgets and you see what's happening in the West Midlands you see what's happening in Manchester you understand that in terms of government having confidence in delivery and accountability structures it allows them to pass and flow more investment through and therefore that's really important for us and it's an incredible person who can be representing East Midlands around that good material fine in conclusion not again and the strong service sectors which thrive here are poised up for success of course there will be challenges but we look towards the establishment of the combined account authority in the upcoming narrow election and with the new economic plan focusing on partnership efforts to build on our collective strengths to unite and shape a prosperous future for North Union you show that the benefits of our economic growth are felt by all in our city thank you I think there's been some really important themes coming out of what we've heard so far and let me just draw together three which I think all three of the speakers so far have mentioned and one is that while we have some strengths we're starting from behind in a number of important respects and then the second one and this is the good news is that you have the potential to catch up and that means lots of growth for ordinary people and then the third one is that while we don't have a magic wand we do have choices and it's these policy choices that I want us to talk about now so I would love to hear your questions to the panel CEO of the mighty creatives we're a social enterprise based in Leicesterville working across East Midlands particularly with young people who are excluded from much of our cultural life the kids who are really the shitty end of the stagnation stick you might say I've got two questions really one for Alex, one for Mel Alex from the point of view of a small SME social enterprise what can we do to help in that stagnation is it something we can do realistically and practically or just looking at the big players in this kind of solar system and all those policy drivers or is there something we can do at a ground level to help those young people end that stagnation and my second question for Mel is very involved with Creative Quarter many years ago through development and market and digital industries development and I'm sure we're all hugely mindful that whilst we know the power of the creative industries in the country and in Nottingham and the Shire when it's about to cut all of its arts and culture provision there is a serious disconnect between what we're saying about the power of the creative industries and what's going on at a public level can you say something to give us some reassurance that that kind of cut isn't going to reap the havoc it could do is that something to be turned around to recognise the power of the creative industries in the kind of services industry and what we need to do in stagnation Thank you and then I'm going to ask in fact I'm going to ask Nora if she has any views on either question and then if it's something that Alex wants to say after that then that's something I'm going to say now Thanks Nick and have a meeting at the council house on Monday to determine budget savings I expect protesters in Old Marque Square and it will be for our elected councillors to decide whether to vote through a budget or not and as you correctly say there are some significant proposals to cut grants in that budget so that's a matter for elected councillors on Monday but let me just say something around the context of that I think it's well known that this city is a wonderful vibrant diverse place it's also well known that our council has been tremendously innovative and done some wonderful things in the past you've only got a good trans system and some other things but we've also made mistakes and some of those mistakes have been costly and the cost of those things if I think about an energy company if I think about some inappropriate stuff around the housing management organisation that's taken 90 million pounds out of the council's results which has reduced the financial resilience of the organisation the other thing I would say in terms of the pressure that councils have been down the land are under some of you may have noticed today that there was an announcement by government that 19 local authorities were receiving something called exceptional financial support in order to be able to balance their budgets for next year now when 19 out of broadly 150 what we call a particular council with social care responsibilities are having to get special support so they don't issue the so-called section 114 notice you know there is something not quite right in our system so the point I'm making is that we're in a place where very tough and difficult decisions are having to be made and I think part of the reflection I sort of talked about the economic plan being a plan for Nottingham and not a plan for the council I think there will be something about how does the city come together to support its people and to support some of its key sectors in the event that these proposals come through so people have their say on Monday but there's a reality that we have to balance our books buying lawful other bits of the public sector can run a deficit health care we can't so that's the context in it Thank you Mel Nora Just to answer your question so when we're talking to inward investors particularly from overseas they don't just want to know about what is the land and the freeport they're going to do they want to know what the infrastructure is round about they want to know where their people can live and they want to know what their people can do so part of the whole narrative around the creative industries whether it's theatre whether it's digital production whether it's making costumes or directing they want to know that they're coming to somewhere which has a base of culture a base of excitement and positivity so I think that there's the job for your sector to do is look at how can you cohesively bring that narrative together and the other practical thing is around I mentioned about the retained business streets that will be generated so moving there that investment the money that is raised there there will be part of our agreement will be to look at how can we stimulate growth in jobs particularly around SMEs and entrepreneurs so there will perhaps be a route forward not right now because the retained business streets are not flowing to that degree but it is something that the freeport which goes across the future direction in Leicestershire will look at how can we ignite some of that SME community that we need to grow business and particularly around apprenticeships and becoming employers of their own Thank you Nora Alex, anything you want to add? Yeah just a little bit I think in terms of what you can do I like that you probably already play quite a big role in helping I think we mostly focus on the government policy and stuff in the book but there is a big focus on the need for education skills human capital essentially in the particular sectors that we are talking about and creative industries because it is a big comparative fund that we have in this country and I think there is a bit of a role in maths and science and education around creative industry type roles is not maybe as strong as it should be in this country so I think you may be furthering a role of providing that education and kind of knowing that you are helping young people to go into jobs that could be very rewarding in the future is great Can I just add to that I advise chair of university and also chair of college and I have to say that the jobs that we are going to have in the future we are not necessarily going to be learning about in either colleges or universities so meta skills and being able to equip yourself with things like problem solving and communication are actually really important and that's why I worked in France and Germany so their education system is very directed at growing meta skills that actually we do need art and music and acting to be able to be taught to our children so that we develop those type of entrepreneurial and social skills that we have kind of neglected in our whole education system so if there were anything that I would say about creative industries it's about reigniting and including in a social inclusion manner how can we get young people to do those things again because I can guarantee the employers of the future will be looking at those problems solving and communication skills that we currently are overlooking Thank you Nora there's a question here This is one out of trouble through the stuff we're in what we call a demographic and transitional we're seeing shrinking population with higher healthcare needs so I don't know in this plan how are you taking that into account because we're talking about what we do know we're shrinking as a population and this is across Europe and there's this tricky conversation about how do we bring more for security different economies I'll take that one so that's a really important point and one of the things so the question was about the aging population and what we do about that and what's contained in this plan and this is a problem we've seen coming from a long way off and there are lots of there's lots of political debates about immigration and that may or may not be part of the solution but one thing that is part of the solution is improving employment rates and hours worked amongst the people who are here we actually did a pretty good job in the 2010s of raising the employment rate older than traditional working age and when you look at countries that are aging rapidly like Italy and Japan for example they've managed to offset a huge amount of their aging by getting more people more of the population into work so that if the problem is basically that there are too many people beyond working age a part of the solution is to ensure that the people who are of working age are doing as much work as they want to to do that work and we put out a report on Monday showing that there's a problem especially now amongst younger people with mental health issues and it's now the case for the first time ever that you're more likely to be out of work with a mental health problem with any health problem in your early 20s than you are in your early 40s and I find that absolutely staggering so it always used to be the case of the older you got it looks like a swoosh and actually is the young people's mental health is this huge problem that we've got and this speaks exactly to the question because yes the country is aging but we're not actually using the resources of the working age population properly so for me that's a big part of the solution but let me see if Nora and Mel want to say anything about that one of the interesting things so my executive career was spent in a global company and we had 3,000 workers in 120 offices worldwide and what we found was that when we were under pressure from shareholders to make a profit we kept our people as they were getting older and grew up in the company but they were the most expensive people and it kind of kept our younger people coming through and actually that was very talented so we then looked at a model of how do we keep that corporate knowledge but how do we bring in how do we bring in new talent and I do think that as industries and businesses we do need to look at how we flex our working arrangements so that we keep our older people working longer so they kind of phase out into four days, three days, two days one day to free up the revenue and the money so that we can bring people in at the junior end of their careers if you like and we have to balance that because too often what we find is that people retire and we suddenly have this positivity of knowledge that we were making our company successful so I do think that we need to look at different models of working and keep people working for longer and engaged for longer because actually that I think has a lot to do with reports on this about the impact of being in employment and the benefit that that has on mental health Yeah, thanks I've probably come at it from a kind of public health and social care end of the lens in the sense of in terms of work is good for us and we've got too many people in Nottingham that whether it's through long term health conditions social isolation or someone are not participating in the labour market and therefore contributing to economic activity and so there's something for me about how through support that can be provided to people in terms of not just in terms of supporting and managing their conditions but also connect them to communities reduce social isolation and therefore set up the conditions for them to participate in economic activity and I think that's something that we need to kind of reflect on as well because in Nottingham the average age for somebody to start living with life in the long term conditions is 57 can you believe that it's one of the lowest in the country so it's a real challenge for us in terms of connecting people to a community Thank you Mel, question back there Oh yeah, thank you for your support I'm Rich from Nottingham Civic Exchange at NTU We did a big piece of work for our own good work in Nottingham back in 2019 and it's really good to see good work come essential to this piece of work thing it's critical to cities like Nottingham we had numbers of conversations in the council and lots of partners about how good work could be a thing in the city and it's really a positive company to go just over at ACAS we had support of workshop about thinking about how to have a good work charter across the Midlands as it is on the city of Midlands energy website is a skeleton effectively but it would be really good to see how organisations like Freeport could sign up to that and think about how businesses and organisations within Freeport across the region can sign up to be good work employers for the benefit both for those people's health and wellbeing their voice in organisations but also the pay benefits and the whole plethora of a kind of good work plethora what that means for the place where we live and work and see and promote and sign up to be really positive is that something you just wanted to say or is that a question? welcome thoughts on Freeport about whether that's something thinking about how the responsibility of organisations signing up needs to be good that's a really easy positive message that you can pick up right now so what do you think about that? I am absolutely delighted to say that we are already on the case on that that we are drawing up a charter companies that are moving on to any of the tax sites to sign up to and it's broadly themed around the fair work agenda but we are delighted to talk to you about that to make sure we shape it properly a lady in the front my name is Faith Dacanje I work with refugees in Nottingham and when I am looking at the way things are going in the city there is a lot of destitution out there refugees in housing and I am not to understand tonight what is the plan because Nottingham has no integration policy and refugees are getting lost along the way and their stories are missing somewhere and their voice is not being heard so what is the plan and where are we as refugees in the plan in terms of equality of services and how long are we going to wait and what is it that we can keep our hope holding on that we want to know what the strategy is all about in terms of economic development Thank you very much Mel, do you want to say something about that from a local perspective and then maybe I'll ask Nora Alex to come in Thank you for the question Faith I think there is something about the significant deprivation and destitution that you sort of reference in terms of the class of our city and the experiences of some of our people and there are some real challenges in terms of the availability of support both in terms of accommodation and other support for newer communities I think the reflection I would make is that I want to understand in terms of the nature of the discussions that are happening at the one lot of your partnership which effectively is our partnership that brings together a whole range of statutory and voluntary bodies in terms of thinking about how we can be open how we can be open and welcoming and supporting all our communities so I'll be happy to have a conversation with you afterwards Nora Alex, do you want to say anything about that I'm not sure that I've really got much to add to that other than all I would say is that from the retained business rates then there will be opportunities to look at community projects which will be of social value but I'm not close enough to the issue to be able to give you a really definitive answer on that I would have to fair to Mel on that Okay, there's another question in the front here and then there's that lady and then I think we're done Thanks very much, my name's Greg Marshall I'm the deputy leader of Brockstow or a council it's mainly for Nora really we've talked several times the panel have talked several times about the importance of infrastructure in the future regeneration Brockstow thinks that they can hold the key to much of that whether that's large strategic housing developments identifying the local plant and the totem whether that's logistics whether that's benally identified within the local plant but one of the biggest problems I think we've faced is the devastating loss of HS2 at totem which I think could have been a bridge between high school manufacturing and engineering and Derby and high school academia and pharmaceuticals the cruins of that I think are still worth investing in particularly the IRP station at totem but the funding model for that is a bizarre one outside of Houston I can't see it's a part private part public funding model for the IRP station can you lend your weight Nora to try and shift that formula in conjunction with whoever is a successful mayor to shift that funding model so we can have a fully funded infrastructure at that totem site which will serve all of these midlands on that Nigerian and Northern Ireland Thank you I mean for me the whole secret about the whole route map to economic growth is all going to be about partnership it's going to be about cohesion and it's going to be about ambition so there are lots of discussions going on about various different initiatives and what the money from that would have been spent on HS2 would be spent on otherwise there is going to be more funding on junction 24 but we haven't quite given up on a spur on HS2 so that's all I can say I'm going to give a moment later discussions going on at government level and we shall certainly lend our weight to the benefit of the area OK we've got time for one more question and I'm going to let you know some of the free news Hi everyone my name is Chi I'm an AI for walkless productivity researcher on the University of Birmingham so I have been listening to conversations about increasing productivity on wages, growth and upskilling so I just want to know how agreeable to human wellbeing and productivity through AI and other policies and solutions So the question is about AI and productivity Yes, how agreeable to AI and other solutions in and of skinning OK Do you want to say something about Alex Orton? Yes OK, so AI is you know this is something that's changing very rapidly I think the problem in the UK is not too many new technologies but that we don't adopt the technologies that we've got so one of the things you notice when you look at the data when you look at the report and please do take a copy on the way out is that the gap between the best firms and the worst firms is a huge one in any industry and if we were able to bring either take the resources out of the worst firms and put them in the best ones up to the same level as the best ones then that would make a huge difference to national productivity So the first thing to say about any new technology is like let's use the ones that we've already got effectively and that will make the economy massively more productive On the specific case of AI I think the jury is still out some people are worried about existential risk from AI that the robots are going to come and get us other people are worried that people will be displaced from jobs but for 250 years at least we've had new technologies being developed some people losing their jobs and then the entirely new jobs being created so many of the jobs that people do in this city didn't even exist 20 years ago or 50 years ago So the key thing is the new economy to continue to innovate to generate new kinds of work as other kinds of work become obsolete The second thing is a really nice paper by an American academic called David Outlaw which I would recommend you to it's very easy to read he wrote recently about AI he sees a huge opportunity in AI in helping people access advanced skills So at the moment if you need an architect or a doctor you've got to pay someone a lot of money and if you're a moderately skilled person you don't end up you suffer as a result of having to pay those high prices and he sees AI as a way of democratising human knowledge actually so that it becomes more accessible to people and that might actually reduce rather than increase in quality I don't know whether the panel want to say anything about AI or go for the free booze Free booze Well I think everyone would prefer free booze I would just say that in terms of AI 98.8% of businesses in the UK are SMEs and SMEs are traditionally a sector a size of company which are very reluctant to adult technology and really embedded But the reality is that AI is already here and it is used in many forms Students use it to run through their dissertations and make sure that legal services use it to make sure that their spelling and grammar is correct So it makes us more efficient So I think that the aim is to be able to make sure that we can adopt in a practical way AI and let it grow with us rather than reel against it I think it's sitting outside the box because it's already here and it's already happening and we need to embrace it and make ourselves more efficient I think on that it's a really interesting regulator in space in terms of AI and where it can play It's obviously emerging very quickly that's great stuff It feels like it's going to be one of those things where nothing feels like it changes until everything changes once I think with that comes a big challenge for the government at all levels who owns that technology what do we allow it to do what do we not allow it to do I think it's all kinds of challenges there but it's still amazing Okay Alex, I'm going to stop it there Thank you very much indeed for coming Please take a book and give your questions Thanks for paying attention and please follow the debate Please follow us on Twitter, on social media and if you don't want to take it as a copy the PDF is there on the website Thanks all very much for coming and thank you to the power