City status is begging to fail

 For a county that doesn’t yet have one, there’s been a lot of local debate recently about cities.

Specifically, there has been a mixed reaction in Suffolk’s three main towns – Bury St Edmunds, Ipswich and Lowestoft – to the opportunity provided to apply for city status as part of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II’s Platinum Jubilee celebrations in 2022.

In Bury and Lowestoft, the emerging consensus seems to be ‘thank you, but not this time around, if you don’t mind”. Which is fair enough.

In Ipswich, by contrast, opinion has been a much more divided. Although the initial announcement that Ipswich Borough Council was game, which sparked a number of other organisations to express an equal keenness to put in an Ipswich bid, the town’s MP Tom Hunt demurred.

In what I thought was a carefully worded and closely argued article, Mr Hunt drew on the evidence of two online surveys that suggested that the majority of the townspeople didn’t think now was the right time to go for city status.

His opposition, less to the principle. and more to the urgency for a bid, quickly resulted in a political collapsing soufflé, with the Labour leader of Ipswich Council suggesting that the opportunity had been scuppered by Mr Hunt’s stance.

Since then, various bodies have honourably sought a reconciliation between the main participants: all to date to no avail.

So, let’s got back to basics and work through the attraction of a longstanding town like Ipswich becoming a city, aside from the bragging rights of local government leaders among their peer groups, of course!

Essentially, the argument is that being a city results in greater prosperity in that the status encourages more inward investment, higher salaries and a generally boosted economic base. There have been any number of surveys that purport to demonstrate this city effect.

Yet, the policy think tank, the Centre for Cities, who obviously know a thing or two about this topic, look at the matter from the opposite lens.

In their 2017 report, ‘What Investors Want’, they opine “Put simply, investors are attracted to a city if there are opportunities to make money. They will assess the attractiveness of a city’s opportunities by estimating their likely return or profit, and will be drawn to cities which offer them the best combination of scale, risk and return.”

The report then goes on to identify the key characteristics, including the quality and affordability of infrastructure, the skills level of the workforce, and quality of education and research and the trading relationships within and beyond the UK.

Now, I don’t bake cakes, but even I know that the icing goes on last. So, unless Ipswich has proven that it has the right ingredients to attract such sustained levels of business interest in a competitive market, isn’t going for city status now only begging for failure?

The key imperative now seems to be for all the main partners in the town, but also beyond, as the Ipswich/Suffolk divide is unhealthy and unnatural, to start delivering the very elements identified by the Centre for Cities that are so attractive to inward investment.

Ipswich Vision, an umbrella body that brings together a wider range of partners, can help articulate, as its name suggests, the grand vision for what Ipswich can stand for.

From this, specific objectives focussed on infrastructure, skills, and trade, need to be set to demonstrate that progress is being made.

The £25m Towns Fund awarded to Ipswich as a result of great partnership working between both Ipswich MPs, and the public and private sectors, provides a foundation upon which to deliver some of these objectives.

In short, all the elements are there: Ipswich just needs to purposefully sort out the basics to ensure that it is best placed the next time that city status is up for grabs.

And that would be the icing on the cake.

First published in the www.suffolkfreepress.co.uk & www.dissexpress.co.uk on Thursday, July 8, 2021.