It has been interesting during the past few weeks meeting with people who are responsible for marketing and promoting their towns and cities. The tourism and visitor economy has become big business in the UK, and every local and regional asset is used to help drive people nationally and internationally to destinations that they may never have considered before.

The growing importance of this sector is demonstrated clearly by Liverpool’s investment into this market. Since the successful hosting of the European Capital of Culture in 2008 the city has become the best visited location in the country outside of London and Edinburgh.

Tourism is big business and every city and county wants a slice of the action.

In both Yorkshire and Lancashire much has been happening to promote the white rose and red rose brands. Lancashire has just enjoyed a very good Preston Guild year and will be attempting to build momentum in 2013 with a series of legacy events, whilst in Leeds we have seen the opening of the new Trinity retail centre, and look forward to the new arena later in the year and the Tour De France in 2014.

However, if you talk to hotels, bars and restaurants – or indeed tourism marketers – they will bemoan the absence from Yorkshire and Lancashire of a product that has become one of the country’s most successful exports: Premier League football.

Blackburn, Blackpool, Burnley and Bolton (officially Greater Manchester but Lancashire to all who live there) have enjoyed life in the big league, as have the two Sheffield clubs and of course Leeds United. Sadly, no more.

It is incredible to me that we have no prospect of any of these clubs being promoted to the top division this season, and I fear that Blackburn may be heading into real trouble and League One with owners who, to put it kindly, appear out of their depth.

What has this to do with business? Well, the economic benefit to the service sector is enormous when Premier League football is in town. Equally the global exposure your city gets around the globe when a local team is involved is massively valuable. 

Let’s hope that next season both Yorkshire and Lancashire clubs can begin to perform on the football field the way the marketing teams are performing to promote both counties. Despite the lack of Premier League football, both are enjoying a boost in the increasingly important tourism sector.

The government’s recent announcement about a £33 billion investment into our railway system that will further cut journey times from the North of England to London has been met with much celebration by those provincial cities that will directly benefit, including Leeds, Manchester and Preston, whilst civic and business leaders in Liverpool are all set to lobby the Department of Transport for its inclusion in the proposed new infrastructure improvements.

It currently takes just two hours and nine minutes to travel from Liverpool Lime Street to London Euston, yet some in the city region believe that failure to cut this time by around thirty minutes will place Liverpool at a significant economic disadvantage.

Although I don’t share the rabid scepticism about HS2 that was expressed by Downtown’s political blogger Jim Hancock here last week, I am finding it equally difficult to get overexcited about the impact shaving half an hour off a journey time to our capital city will have on the economy of the North.

Indeed, I find it somewhat bizarre that this plan will potentially mean that I will be able to get to London quicker than I can get to Leeds or Sheffield, not to mention Newcastle and Glasgow.

The assumption that enabling Northern cities quicker access to London will equate to a business and economic boost to the North is neither proven nor inevitable. Indeed, there is an argument that what HS2 may lead to is a talent drain from the North to the South.

For me, a multi billion pound investment that connected the North better, with more efficient rail and road networks, would be an exciting and innovative programme that would be well worth getting behind.

The HS2 project is twenty to thirty years off delivery anyway, and it does offer Westminster politicians a fig behind which they can hide when challenged on the North – South divide.

The unhealthy obsession that we have in respect of London means that this project is unlikely to be de-railed. However, Northern business leaders and decision makers should be arguing for infrastructure schemes that will provide us with better connectivity across our region, rather than allowing the capital to seduce us and dictate the agenda once again.

As this is my last blog of the year I thought I would take the opportunity of looking forward to 2013, and what I hope for over the next twelve months.

The budget statement from George Osborne on Wednesday doesn’t really give you a great amount of optimism as far as the economy is concerned. ‘Flat lining’ appears to be the new normal, and the chancellor is either hamstrung by his coalition partners from creating an agenda for growth driven by enterprise, or lacks the courage and imagination to back the UK’s entrepreneurs and business owners.

I hope that in 2013 the coalition collapses. We need, more than ever, clear and decisive leadership, and an agenda that the whole of the government believe in and can get behind. I have always been sceptical about government by coalition, and it is a particularly tricky art when you are dealing with a party as flaky as the Liberal Democrats. I would much prefer an outright Tory or Labour led parliament, where we would know where we were as far as policy was concerned. 

My next hope is that, whoever is in charge in Westminster, there is recognition of the need to re-balance the economy across the regions. We may be suffering recession in most parts of the country, but London and the South East continues to enjoy prosperity.

I do not begrudge London its place as a leading world city. Indeed it could be argued that without London, we could be another Greece! Nonetheless, the austerity measures that have been imposed on the public sector in the North have been disproportionate to the South, and if we really are ‘all in this together’ then a review of the next round of cuts ought to be undertaken as a matter of urgency.

Internationally we must all wish for the United States to agree a budget! The President is currently in a stand-off with his Congress over the country’s economic strategy, and if there isn’t agreement in January then the US economy falls off a cliff – taking the rest of us down with it.

The fact that we are so clearly operating in a global economy nowadays, with the prospects of the Euro and the Dollar every bit as important as to what is happening to the Pound, does make one question why world leaders are not working more closely together and finding a way of co-ordinating their approach to an elongated financial crisis that has seemingly got our world leaders totally baffled.

Closer to home, and on planet Downtown, I am expecting an exciting year in our newest city Leeds, where we will see a new arena and the new Trinity retail centre opening. Regeneration projects in Liverpool include a new conference centre, four hotels and hopefully the green light for the multi-million pound Liverpool Waters project. Manchester will continue to cement its position as the economic hub for the North, whilst in Lancashire the Local Enterprise Partnership has defied the odds and appears to have actually got the 999 local council’s talking to one another, and doing some decent work around business and economic growth.

With no elections in the cities next year, politically all eyes will be on the County Council elections, with the Conservative controlled Lancashire facing a strong challenge from Labour in May.

Promotion for Leeds United and one of the Lancashire Championship clubs to the Premier League would be good not only for supporters of the respective clubs, but for business too. The Premier League brings a profile and prestige to any town or city that money just can’t buy, and the spin-off economic benefit is enormous.

Qualification for the Champions League for Everton and an FA Cup win would be nice, and I’m happy for the Premier League to remain in the North West – so long as it doesn’t go to Anfield, of which there is more chance of Nick Clegg delivering a Liberal Democrat pledge.

Finally, I wish success and a recession proof year for all those companies who are members of Downtown. Your loyalty and support is very much appreciated and I wish you all a very merry Christmas and a prosperous New Year.

Lord Heseltine’s report ‘No Stone Unturned’, published with a fanfare of publicity last week, demonstrated that the former Deputy Prime Minister has not lost his appetite for government intervention, decentralisation and constructive criticism of leaders of his own party.

Calling on Messrs Cameron and Osborne to develop a ‘strategy for growth’, many of the 89 recommendations contained within his latest missive would be welcomed by most pragmatic Labour politicians. Indeed, Leeds West MP Rachel Reeves and Chuka Umunna, Labour’s Shadow Business Minister, were among the first out of the blocks to welcome Hezza’s document.

Certainly his narrative surrounding an acceleration of the ‘localism’ agenda that would see the abolition of two tier local government; the extension of elected or ‘metro’ mayors to cover natural geographical economic areas such as Greater Manchester, Merseyside and the Leeds City Region; and the devolution of budgets to regional agencies in an attempt to re-balance the UK economy, would all be generally welcomed by a private sector that is often left baffled and frustrated by the complex, bureaucratic structure of governance that we currently have to battle with.

However, it was with with some trepidation, that I viewed Michael Heseltine’s recommendation of providing more powers to Local Enterprise Partnerships as a key to devolving power.

Though I would fully support the notion of a transfer of power from Whitehall to our major cities and city regions, the idea that Local Enterprise Partnerships will become all powerful is somewhat concerning. LEP’s are very much a work in progress, and even though the local LEP here in Leeds City Region is better than most, it still suffers from the lack of accountability and legitimacy that should go hand in hand with the responsibilities this report is suggesting.

Surely any transfer of powers from accountable, elected politicians in Westminster should go to elected, accountable politicians in the regions?

If I was being extremely unkind, I would say that the former Minister for Merseyside’s report is more ‘back to the future’ than ‘new frontier’. TEC’s, Business Link’s, economic development boards all come and go, but somewhere; somehow the people running them appear to re-emerge under different titles, but offering more of the same.

‘The usual suspects’ are not what we need for these unusual times. If LEP’s are to be provided with the funding pots and strategic powers that Heseltine is arguing for, then they will need to be reviewed and renewed as a matter of urgency.

‘Tarzan’s’ other suggestion that Chambers of Commerce ought to be seen as the voice of business is a ludicrously outdated view. I could not say it any better than our Downtown Manchester chairman Michael Taylor who wrote last week:  “I pass no comment on local Chambers...but in many parts of the country they are moribund talking shops; nothing more than a Rotary Club for local shopkeepers to demand that the police chase the gypsies off roundabouts.”

Nonetheless, Heseltine’s findings are a useful contribution to the debate as to how the government compliments its austerity programme with initiatives that will start to genuinely stimulate the economy. As always, this political giant has produced a strategy that may not be universally welcomed across the political spectrum – but it certainly can’t be ignored.

You can view the full report here.

It was great to finally get ‘formally’ started in Leeds last week, with our launch event at the Corn Exchange on Thursday, followed by a breakfast forum the following morning with the leader and chief executive of the city council.

The conversation I had with Cllr. Keith Wakefield and Tom Riordan on Friday morning was refreshingly open and honest. Mistakes of the past were readily admitted to, including the adoption of the now moribund ‘Live Leeds, Love Leeds’ slogan. There was also a recognition that Leeds was not as good as it ought to be in terms of promoting and marketing itself, despite its many fabulous assets.

Before a city can progress, it needs to recognise its strengths, and more importantly its weaknesses. It struck me that the council leadership has most certainly done that.

There was talk of more helpful engagement in the future with the private sector, particularly developers. Rivalry with other cities and places will always exist, but often collaboration is better than confrontation – and that included closer co-operation with Manchester. The arena and new Trinity retail centre provide huge opportunities, but challenges too; not least the need to get future marketing campaigns right.

What struck me most though was the optimism and ambition that the leaders of Leeds articulated in impressive fashion. They want Leeds to be the best provincial city in the UK. They want excellence to be the term most associated with brand Leeds. And they genuinely want to have an effective dialogue with the business community – something Downtown can certainly help with in the future months and years.