A whole world of new industry out there for us
AS the green industrial revolution accelerates, the West Midlands must learn the lessons of our own history. Cities like Birmingham, Coventry, and Wolverhampton were miles from the seas and the great rivers that carried trade.
They could have easily remained a quiet backwater.
But it was the West Midlands that triggered the carbon revolution when the first viable steam engine began to puff, wheeze and pump at Dudley Castle in 1712.
The Boulton & Watt engines perfected down the lane at the world renowned Soho Manufactory were world changing.
Around the world were many places rich in iron and coal waiting to be exploited.
But the West Midlands had something their potential rivals in France, for example, lacked: the freedom to meet and discuss ideas.
Those who created the industrial revolution seized this freedom. The Lunar Society is probably the best known example.
But Midlands industrialists would meet in Quaker meeting houses, Unitarian chapels, coffee shops, clubs, and newly formed trade associations, to share ideas, markets, and make deals.
We are now on the cusp of another industrial revolution, but without a forum which enables the whole region to create the vision and set the priorities for the future.
That’s why we need a West Midlands Forum that brings together all the stakeholders who contribute to the life and industry of this wonderful region.
Our duty is clear and so is the opportunity: there is a whole world of new industry just waiting to be seized from the climate crisis.
And we have it within our grasp to turn our once great workshop of the world into a green workshop of the world. A clean-tech capital of the 21st century.
The metal triangle between Coventry and Birmingham up through the Black Country to Stoke over to Derby and Nottingham, is home to the factories and firms that make the planes, trains and automobiles that keep us mobile. The trouble is they emit tonnes of carbon.
Over a quarter of carbon emissions smoke out from our transport system. Yet in this century, this vast factory
floor, home to some of the best paid jobs in Britain, could become a mighty green workshop that makes the green transportation of the future.
The world market for electric vehicles - like the newest products made by Jaguar Land Rover or the iconic electric cabs made by the London Electric Vehicle Company in Coventry - was worth over £100 billion last year and will multiply eight times in the next seven years.
As work starts on HS2, we find ourselves at the happy epicentre of the £200 billion worth of investment going into our railways over the next couple of decades.
Now the first hybrid electric-hydrogen plane has taken to the air, we have to think radically about modernising the UK’s world-leading aerospace industry.
Last year, the world spent about
£90 billion on new aircraft. The market for jet-zeroes will be huge.
Around this hub-bub of industry new services - from financial services to the creative economy - to healthtech - could boom as some relocate and business born here grows.
Second, as the home of Bournville, the place that helped inspire the garden cities of the past, we have around us, the seeds of the ideas we need to design net zero modes of living.
That revolution has the potential to create billions of pounds in contracts for our army of white van workers. One in twelve of the West Midlands workforce work from their trusty mobile workshops as sparkies, scaffolders, chippies, brickies, plumbers, the landscapers and gardeners - the tradesmen and women who’ll deliver the retrofitting, zero-carbon homes of the green and pleasant neighbourhoods of the future.
Now if we get this right, we can create the wealth we need to reverse the second great crisis of our time; the appalling, stubborn, shameful divisions between rich and poor and the inequality that scars us.
Tragically, we remain the nation’s capital of unemployment, a place where the homeless still sleep on the streets, where lines at food banks and pantries are long and where the rich live eight years longer than the poor.
How can this be right in one of the richest countries on earth?
Without a strong and authoritative voice, the West Midlands will continue to be short-changed. Analysis of the budget shows the West Midlands won £216 million less than the North West in combined Levelling Up and Towns Fund money, coming just fourth overall in the UK.
Our transport package was £1 billion less than we sought and transport funding per person was close to bottom of the league table for English regions.
So, there’s work to do. Futures to win. And if our history teaches us one thing, when we pull together well, there’s almost nothing we can’t do.
Together as a region we’ve got a fighting chance.
That’s why good people across our region have come together to create the West Midlands Forum; a place to share ideas; to debate ways of creating the wealth of the future; to consider lessons from each other and the world around us.
We must make our case to the floor of Parliament and the corridors of power in Whitehall for the resources we need.
We must show investors that we are worth backing. We must show the world we have products and technology worth buying.
We must make our case to the floor of Parliament and the corridors of power in Whitehall for the resources we need