Article for “South Wales Business Review”
“A vision without action is just a dream; an action without vision just passes time; a vision with an action changes the world.”
-Nelson Mandela
“It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change”
-Charles Darwin
Introduction
There is a big vision for south west Wales in the air at the moment, a vision of transforming one of the most beautiful parts of Wales and the United Kingdom into an attractive destination for more knowledge orientated activities, particularly in energy, advanced engineering/high value manufacturing, tourism/food, architectural services, legal and accounting, media, IT, business services, construction and real estate.
Delivery of this big vision is at the heart of the new Swansea Bay City Region approach across the 4 local authorities – Pembrokeshire, Carmarthenshire, Swansea, Neath and Port Talbot - serving a population of 685,000, supporting some 280,000 jobs, and containing around 20,000 businesses. The new Swansea Bay City Region’s Economic Strategy 2013-2030 makes it clear that the vision must be sustainable, delivering opportunities for future generations, not just for the present. It must embrace long term solutions – some of which will be extremely difficult and challenging – building on the City Region’s existing strengths, whilst being responsive to new opportunities. It recognises that protecting and enhancing our substantial environmental assets is an essential component of the regeneration goals. The strategy does not call for quick fixes as past experience tells us that stubborn problems cannot be addressed in this way.
The Challenge
In this article, I’m going to argue that if the principles of sustainability can underpin the City Region approach, then the stage is set for a hugely exciting, transformative development; playing to our environmental strengths, while fostering a collaborative and co-operative approach to a more socially just economy in south west Wales.
We are privileged to live in a glorious, natural environment which includes 320 miles of coastline i.e. more than 30% of the new Wales Coast Path, two National Parks, the first Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty (AONB) in the UK – the Gower peninsula – and dynamic urban centres including Swansea city centre, and attractive market towns serving as local economic, leisure and service hubs. We have globally significant firms, for example, Tata Steel in Neath Port Talbot and Valero in Pembrokeshire. We have two universities, providing a valuable mix of research-oriented and applied educational and innovation opportunities, as well as major tourism assets and leisure attractions. We can provide an affordable choice for families, with an average housing cost of under £110k, compared to more than £160k in the UK as a whole. In a number of key sectors we have the potential to drive real productivity gains and boost our economic competitiveness, both through our existing companies and potentially through new in-movers and further enterprise development in energy, advanced engineering/high value manufacturing, construction, tourism, media, IT and business services.
But even with all these advantages, a major productivity gap has emerged between the City Region, the rest of Wales and the UK. In 2010, our productivity was equivalent to only 94% of the Welsh level and 77% of the UK total. On skills, we have insufficient people with higher level qualifications and too many people with no qualifications at all. Only 28% of our residents have NVQ4+ qualifications (degree level or equivalent), compared to 33% across the UK. Further, 14% of our working age residents have no qualifications, against a comparable figure of 11% in the UK.
We don’t fare well on unemployment and economic inactivity either. All places across the UK have suffered as a result of the recession in terms of rising unemployment and economic inactivity. However, economic activity is now well below national levels – at 71% compared to 76% in the UK (and 72% in Wales). Further, jobs are all too often in those occupations which tend to pay relatively little.
The Delivery
Mark Twain once famously said “If you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always get what you’ve always had”. The new opportunity of the Swansea Bay City Region is an opportunity to do things differently; to not just try and drag a share of any investment in SE Wales into SW Wales but to play to our strengths – the landscape, the seascape and the quality of life, and target what will work best for us and best for the companies we want to attract, because that will also be best for Wales.
First and foremost, we have to tackle the skills deficit in our region. Our ability to attract the very companies we would want is substantially diminished by having 3% more unqualified residents and 5% fewer residents qualified to degree level or above, than other parts of the UK. Closing this gap is daunting, but we have the advantage of a couple of unique collaborations here which could play a significant targeted role in up-skilling the population.
The first is the unique Central and South West Wales Regional Learning Partnership (RLP) which brings together local government (both education and regeneration), the two universities – Swansea and the University of Wales Trinity Saint David, the five colleges of further education, third sector partners, work- based learning and private sector representatives, JobCentre Plus and Careers Wales. It covers the local authority boundaries of Carmarthenshire CC, Ceredigion CC, Neath Port Talbot CBC, Pembrokeshire CC, Powys CC and the City & County of Swansea with the aim of ensuring publically funded learning providers and associated organisations work collaboratively, effectively and efficiently across the areas of education and regeneration to meet the needs of learners and the regional economy in the region. Ultimately, the partnership seeks to align regional learning and employment needs activity to the regional economic context. The RLP is the only one of its kind and has been acknowledged by Welsh Government as ‘transformational’ for its ability to plan collaboratively across sectors, to identify gaps and to provide high quality data on the basis of which members can take decisions about how and where to invest in up-skilling. The RLP is currently facilitating the development of the Swansea Bay City Region plan for employability and skills.
The second unique collaboration is my university, the newly transformed University of Wales Trinity Saint David (UWTSD), including Coleg Sir Gar and Coleg Ceredigion, with 20,000 students (check) on three campuses in Swansea, five in Carmarthenshire, three in Ceredigion and two in London as well as the Wales International Academy of Voice based in Cardiff.
This is a new university model – a first for Wales - designed to serve the city region by delivering tangible benefits for learners, employers, industry and communities by offering a new integrated approach from school level to post-doctoral research across the Swansea Bay City Region, thereby actively addressing the skills gaps identified. The University intends to play a pivotal role in the promotion of social justice, economic renewal and the development of cultural and environmental wealth, for full time and part time students. As I write, staff members across the university are busy reviewing our current courses, testing their fitness for purpose and creating new ones for next September focused on employers’ needs using data from the RLP.
Having looked at universities across the world, the new UWTSD has very specifically put the principles of ‘employability’ and ’sustainability’ at the heart of the new university’s strategic plan. Rather than focus exclusively on our individual course offer, as universities have often historically done, we also intend to focus on the graduate attributes we want our students to demonstrate. Quite simply, we want our graduates to become the next generation of creative problem solvers and active citizens – to be able to appreciate the importance of environmental, social and political contexts to their studies and to think creatively, holistically, and systemically and make critical judgements on issues. After all, many of them come from within our beautiful region and choose to stay within it, so how better to educate tomorrow’s community leaders? The education we deliver, underpinned by high quality research, will be distinctive; it will develop the minds and skills of our students, and also be inclusive, professional and employment-focused.
We have just introduced a new TSD+ Employability Award to be taken by all our undergraduate students to deliver on these attributes and the more traditional ones of teamwork, self-reflection and communication. Hywel Evans, Chairman of Swansea Business Forum said last year, “My prospects would have been better and less constricted – as indeed would those of most of my peer group - if the programme you now propose to run at TSD had been available to us at Swansea those many years ago. Broadening students’ academic experience through offering them an opportunity to gain “real-life” expertise during their college days has many benefits. Students also gain by being able to more effectively evaluate the likely personal demands upon them of any specific job opportunity - based on the wider set of skills and background experience they have acquired through the TSD+ programme.”
The role of INSPIRE is to work across the whole new University to deliver more ‘inspired’ education, work-based learning and knowledge transfer opportunities to our region as well as to those full time students we attract here through our locations and our offer. We want to explicitly tackle the skills deficit as well as offer new professional practice opportunities in partnership with others - but to do it in a new, more sustainable way. Without under-estimating the challenges ahead for the new Swansea Bay City Region , we believe that holding our collective nerve to focus on sustainability and employability at the heart of the new city region, might just be the dream ticket we need for south west Wales.