Greener Pastures
With the cost of running a business in the south-east ballooning, more and more companies are turning their backs on london and looking for more cost-effective locations
With the cost of running a business in the south-east ballooning, more and more companies are turning their backs on london and looking for more cost-effective locations
In 2006 England’s eight Regional Development Agencies will spend £2.3bn. The
Welsh Development Agency spent £295m in the financial year 2004/05, and 163
offers of selective assistance were accepted by clients of RSA Scotland,
totalling more than £69m. Regional development is and at least until new EU
guidelines come into force at the end of 2006 will continue to be big business
for companies who want to invest in the more deprived areas of the UK.
Although the London Development Agency, charged with revitalising the poorest
areas of the capital, is the second largest of England’s RDAs with an allocation
of £373m for 2005/06, the vast majority of the UK’s regional assistance goes to
business projects outside the prosperous south-east.
London’s businesses would seem to be the perfect target for that assistance.
The December 2005 KPMG/CBI London Business Survey found that 81% of businesses
considered the cost of operating in London to be higher or much higher than in
other capital cities.
Of those surveyed, 37% said the cost of living was much higher in London,
with an impact on the salaries on offer for skilled jobs. Two thirds expected
upwards wage pressures and 53% expected skills shortages in the immediate
future.
London is clearly a victim of its own booming economy: 48% of businesses
consulted said that the cost of housing led to increased business costs, and 30%
had to alter working hours to accommodate staff who could not live close to the
office.
Capital costs
‘Overall the cost of doing business in London is considerably higher than
other major capital cities: businesses may be prepared to pay a premium for now
in order to avail of the opportunities it presents but for how long? Unless
the barriers of doing business in the capital are addressed, London’s
competitiveness will be eroded,’ the report concludes.
So London’s businesses should be ripe for relocation, a fact that David
Parker, project manager for business services at the Wales Development Agency,
confirms. He spends on average four days a week in the Agency’s London office.
‘We have a big push on in London,’ he says, ‘It goes without saying that any UK
region is more cost-effective than London.’
Yet this ‘big push’ has to be conducted with the utmost care, because the
rules under which UK regional development functions specifically prohibit
offering incentives to displace jobs from one region of the UK to another. In
practice, trends like outsourcing make a nonsense of this rule, as Parker
admits. ‘What we’re not allowed to do is encourage any organisation based in the
UK to shut down and move out of the capital. But in the real world, if it’s a
question of either moving to a region or going overseas altogether, the
government allows us some flexibility.’
That flexibility, for example, allowed the WDA to offer grant aid to
LogicaCMG to open its Waterton offices in Bridgend in March 2005, creating 750
jobs in the area by 2007 for its outsourcing hub. No one would disagree that
there was sound financial sense in relocating that part of its business outside
the south-east for LogicaCMG, but because the company was considering moving
offshore, it also qualified for development funding administered through the
Welsh Assembly cited by the company as a ‘key factor’ in the decision.
‘There is a lower cost of business in south Wales than in the south-east, and
with a very stable workforce that becomes a significantly lower cost,’ says Tony
Lewis, LogicaCMG’s business development manager for global service delivery in
south Wales. Bridgend is now the outsourcing hub for Europe, a role that the
company claims might have passed further afield to facilities in Bangalore or
the Czech Republic.
Grey area
While there is no suspicion that LogicaCMG’s plan to possibly move offshore
was not genuine, Nigel Wilcock, regional development director at Ernst &
Young, admits the rules around relocation are a grey area that might be exploite
d by companies to earn grant aid for relocation from the south-east. It is a
test of the mettle of an RDA: to refuse to grant aid based on a suspicion that
plans to relocate outside the UK might only serve to ruin its chances of getting
the business if another competing RDA steps in.
‘Overall the development agencies do sign up to the idea that it’s not wise
to steal from one region and give to another,’ Wilcock says, ‘If companies are
going to try that game these days, development agencies are wise to it and they
are sharper. But it’s the challenge they face: what credibility do they give to
the alternative path that they hear about.’
Wilcock believes these suspicions are well founded. ‘Your client is never
absolutely going to come out and say, “we would have done that investment
anyway”, but I think we have seen instances when that has happened.’
Building expertise
Ultimately, regional relocation grants can have the useful effect of
accelerating the creation of alternative hubs of expertise in the UK. Wilcock
points out that, while some would consider grant aid for a relocation project
that already offers a return on investment for the companies involved is open to
criticism, the net effect for the regions are strong alternative centres of
expertise.
‘RDAs should not be providing grants unless the company needs the grant,’ he
says, ‘and they realise that most of the job creation would have happened
anyway, but that doesn’t mean [offering financial assistance] is necessarily a
bad thing.’
An example of a strong regional hub is the Glasgow International Financial
Services District, home to recently established offices outside London for
Morgan Stanley, JP Morgan and Deutsche Bank among others. Since 2001, it has
created 9,000 jobs, and built 960,000 sq. ft of office space.
Today, one in 13 people in Glasgow works in financial services. Part of the
incentive is the assistance given in grant aid, but ultimately the local economy
makes Glasgow attractive to companies headquartered in London when they decide
to recruit. According to the Office for National Statistics, the average wage in
Glasgow is £438 per week compared to £637 in London, £467 Edinburgh and £472 in
Manchester.
In targeting companies already headquartered in the UK, RDAs are only doing
their job: it’s a brave government official that will label a successful job of
attracting investment from London-based companies as displacement activity.
Parker points out that the political and economic penalty of letting jobs leave
the UK, whether the threat is real or not, affects how government treats this
grey area.
‘The only way we could answer the question [of whether threats to leave the
UK are genuine] is to shut the RDAs and see if the same investment happened in
the regions,’ Parker says. ‘I wouldn’t want to be the minister that takes that
decision.’