LET’S HEAR SOME CHEERS WHEN THE JOB CREATORS ARRIVE
THERE IS great excitement here in Barnsley at the news that international distribution company Hermes is planning to open a £60m automated distribution centre off junction 36 of the M1, bringing 1,300 jobs to the town.
It’s not just any distribution centre; Hermes claim that, at 363,000 square feet, it will be the biggest in Europe. It’s already got a name, Colossus. Up to 1.3 million parcels a day are expected to pass through its doors.
The company’s chief executive, Martijn de Lange, says the new centre is needed due to the boom in online shopping. No doubt some of the jobs that will be created will be part of the 85 per cent that haven’t been invented yet.
Remember, they’re the ones our children will be doing in 10 years’ time, according to the recent prediction from the Institute for the Future (yes, such an organisation does exist).
However, back to 2020 and there are practical, infrastructure-based reasons for choosing this particular location. The site is attractive because its proximity to the M1 would allow for tighter delivery times for customers of retailers including Next, John Lewis, and fashion firm ASOS, which already has a huge warehouse in Barnsley. They don’t call the company Hermes for nothing – it’s named after the Greek god of speed.
Impressive stuff, isn’t it? No wonder everyone is excited. Everyone, that is, except our local council, it would seem. You would expect councillors and officers to be falling over themselves in fulsome praise and welcoming the bosses of this German-owned company with open arms. It’s not every Leave-voting town in the North of England that has something quite so positive to celebrate in the immediate aftermath of Brexit.
Not Barnsley Metropolitan Borough Council however. At least so far. The immediate response was muted, at best. I have every respect for the due processes of local government, but I was kind of expecting something rather more goget-‘em-tiger than the official statement, from Matt Gladstone, Executive Director for Place.
When I last studied media relations, the rule was to be as positive as possible. Yet he opened with such a series of negatives you could almost imagine him squirming in his seat: “We are yet to adopt a masterplan framework which opens up potential sites for development or receive a planning application for the site Hermes has identified close to junction 36 of the M1.”
Where was the hurrah, the wow factor, the sense that ‘this will help bring beleaguered Barnsley into the 21st century and put it back on the map’?
Where was the recognition that distribution and warehousing has brought thousands of jobs to neighbouring Doncaster, which also suffered greatly when the pits closed and the railway industry contracted?
It’s also important to know that much of the land around the proposed site was once dominated by coal mines. For goodness sake, even a note of cautious optimism would have been welcome.
I’m not pointing the finger at Mr Gladstone personally. There may well be reasons for his hesitancy which are not yet public knowledge. He raised the point that such major schemes need to tie in with ecological sustainability and went on to stress that “new development needs to improve quality of life for our residents”.
I’d say the number one way to improve quality of life, frankly, is to get a job. I read some official labour market figures from research organisation Nomis recently which suggest that the average weekly wage in Barnsley is now £532 compared to the regional average of £540 and national average of £587.
It looks good at first sight, but Nomis will also reveal that some 17.7 per cent of families across the borough are what’s known as ‘workless’. I think that Barnsley has much to be proud of, but almost a fifth of families without any kind of employment won’t be on the list.
Many of these will be families where unemployment is multi-generational. Children who grow up in them often disengage with education and the pattern gets set to repeat. It’s tempting to blame the parents, but lack of confidence in finding and keeping a job is a huge factor. I’m not saying that a few thousand new jobs will be a panacea for all, but the fact that a big international firm has interest in a town which is so often vilified must surely raise hope, at least.
Hermes’s confidence in Barnsley will surely encourage others to follow. The time is ripe for the North to play its full part in economic progress. And internet shopping. Love it or blame it for the decline of Western civilisation, you can’t deny that it is a sustainable industry of the future and it is fantastic that our region is to play a major part in this. We have to look forward, not back.
Next time a major international firm offers to pitch its tent in a field off the M1, Barnsley needs to make it very clear that it is most definitely open for business.
Next time a major international firm offers to pitch its tent in a field off the M1, Barnsley needs to make it very clear that it is most definitely open for business.