I thoroughly enjoyed last week’s series of events organised by Downtown Lancashire for our annual Business Week.

It is always difficult to strike the right balance in terms of subjects to discuss and places to focus on, but this year, as part of our ongoing ‘Big Conversation’ about the county’s future, we wanted to provide platforms which enabled real businesses to contribute their thoughts, ideas and solutions to the debate.

It was an enlightening experience, as positivity reigned. Despite the miserable summer, the continuing recession and England’s elimination from the European Championship (we were still in it last week, but we all knew what was coming), there was an optimism and a determination among delegates that illustrated how feisty Lancastrians really are.

The word used time and again by business leaders and decision makers was ‘collaboration’. The need to identify potential partners is as important now as identifying competitors. The private sector often criticises the public sector for a lack of co-operation and co-ordination. But maybe we in commerce can be accused of the same thing. Examples of bartering of services, alternative vehicles for access to finance, and the value of quality business support were all presented by panellists and attendees alike.

The week left me feeling better about myself and my business.  It also left me to consider why Lancashire, more than any other place I work in, has a ‘fiefdom’ approach among its business organisations, when, very clearly, this is an alien attitude among the vast majority of businesses that operate in the county.   

Maybe the new structures that have been established by the Local Enterprise Partnership will not only make the local authorities work together, but the various business organisations that exist in the county too. Downtown is up for that. Let’s see who else is. 

Downtown has just come to the end of our ‘Business Week’ season. Every year, we have a five day programme of events that focuses on business and entrepreneurs in each of the locations where we operate, and this last week we have been in Liverpool, where over 400 delegates attended the five events that were organised.

In April, we held a Business Week in Manchester, and Lancashire’s Business Week took place in May.

In Liverpool and Manchester, we hosted all of our activities in city centre venues, and we attracted businesses from many areas outside of the respective cities, with companies from Sefton, Knowsley and the Wirral happy to come into Liverpool, and similarly firms from Bury, Salford and Trafford attending our Manchester forums.

In Lancashire though there is still a resistance, it seems, for people in East Lancashire to travel to West Lancashire, and vice versa.

Given the fabulous motorway networks, which we never tire of telling potential inward investors about, and the relatively quick journey times across the county compared to the amount of time you sit in your car trying to get into Liverpool or Manchester city centre, the problem appears even more perverse.

The row over the Local Enterprise Partnership, bun fights over the Tithebarn development and the endless battle for supremacy between the county council and Blackburn Unitary can explain the divide among public sector agencies- but the notion that we in the private sector cannot see the potential of doing business county wide is difficult to fathom in a global economy.

For our part, the Downtown Lancashire goal is to create an environment that allows companies from across the entire county to engage and hopefully do some business together. To achieve that goal, we will be hosting events in Ribble Valley, Blackburn and Preston over the summer, and we hope many of you will come along and see what we have to offer. In the absence of a recognised hub, maybe we will have to find Lancashire’s Switzerland in order to secure a regular meeting place. In the meantime, we’ll go ‘on tour’ and do our bit in bringing the red rose business community closer together.

When the late, great Tony Wilson and I used to debate the merits or otherwise of Liverpool and Manchester, the enigmatic TV presenter and broadcaster used to say that the biggest problem with Scousers was our wonderful ability to celebrate bad news.

He contended that if Jaguar announced a programme that created 1,000 jobs for Liverpudlians on the same day as a Granny was mugged in Old Swan, the mugging story would be on the front page of the Echo, and the good news story buried on page 4. The Manchester Evening News would do the exact opposite. Tony often added “You can’t complain if the press you get nationally is so bad, when locally its worse’.

Thursday’s Liverpool Daily Post (LDP) reminded me of Tony’s words – and sadly not for the first time confirmed him to be right.

The front page headline screamed ‘PEEL CALLS A HALT ON £3.5BN MERSEY BARRAGE PLAN’. The report went on to explain that Peel Energy has – for now- put on hold an ambitious scheme to build a tidal barrage across the Mersey estuary to generate renewable electricity.

On page 4, and almost lost underneath a continuation of this bad news story, the LDP made mention of Joe Anderson’s reveal at a Downtown Liverpool event during Business Week on Tuesday that the Cruise Liner terminal is more than likely to happen.

This development will be of huge benefit to the city, create wealth, jobs and opportunities for growth, and delivers a key component of the city’s economic strategy. So why did the LDP give precedence to the negative over the positive?

If that wasn’t enough, on the Wednesday Downtown hosted another event where a leading international expert in enterprise and entrepreneurship, Jonathan Ortmans, extolled the many virtues of our city, and explained why the Global Entrepreneurship Congress was coming to Liverpool in 2012. His comments did not even merit a mention by the LDP on Thursday.

Is it that, as all good editors and journalists have to do, they are feeding into what their Scouse readers want? Or has the city moved on and the local media failed to recognise the fact?

I, like many of us in this city, are proud that we still boast two daily newspapers. However, print media is in decline, and we often hear that the LDP is struggling circulation wise more than most. Could it be that the ‘old’ Liverpool way of celebrating bad news is being replaced with a more modern, optimistic outlook that simply fails to appreciate a media that all too often appears willing to overlook the good news to tell us the bad?

I’m not in the newspaper industry, and no doubt the LDP would be able to argue that my comments are far too generalised and inaccurate. But, if perception is everything, then they should know that the image of local newspapers in this city at the moment is that they are far too eager to promote knocking copy and that is not good news for Liverpool.