What next for Leeds United?

Leeds United

This week the unlikely pair of Watford and Bournemouth are celebrating their promotion from the Championship to the promised-land that is the Premier League.

Not the most fashionable of clubs, it is nevertheless refreshing to see unfancied teams succeeding and in the case of both newly promoted sides, it is fair to say that, Bournemouth, in particular, have enjoyed a real rags to riches journey over the past few years.

These two Cinderella clubs leave some genuine giants behind them for another season, none bigger than this city’s very own Leeds United.

At the seasons start I, as a glass half full kind of guy, blogged about reasons to be cheerful following the installation of a new owner for the club. However, without going into the unfortunate detail surrounding the various controversies surrounding Massimo Cellino, 2014/15 has been another in a long line of wasted seasons at Elland Road.

Had Leeds picked up half as many points as their new owner has had in column inches they would have been crowned Champions by Christmas. As it is, the farcical nature of the off field antics of owner, injured players and the managerial turnstile that has apparently been installed at Elland Road – and it has been another false dawn; another frustrating nine months of football in a division that Leeds have been stranded in for far too long.

It has, of course, been worse, with the club spending a short time in the English leagues third tier for a period since its dramatic demise since the Premiership relegation of 2007. But that is no consolation for supporters who still hark back to memories of the halcyon days of Revie, Giles and Bremner; and in more recent times the Howard Wilkinson title winning team of 1991-92.

Average attendances are still a relatively healthy 25,000 plus, the away following is as passionate as ever, and the club still has a reputation in the English game that, with the right investment and management, would surely attract a crop of players decent enough to challenge for a place in the top league once again.

But that seems a million miles away, and Leeds fans will spend the summer worrying more about survival than they will dreaming about ‘doing a Bournemouth.’ It is a crying shame for the club, its fans, for football in general – and for the city’s economy too. Because Premier League football is huge business for our hospitality sector, and provides a massive boost to the city’s marketing potential and profile as well.

The sooner Leeds can get back on track and back where they belong, the better. But not even the optimists among us are holding our breath anymore.

What next for Leeds

Earlier this week Councillor Keith Wakefield announce his resignation as the leader of Leeds City Council. I have met Cllr Wakefield on several occasions, interviewed him at the very first Downtown Leeds policy forum, and always considered him to be a steady and thoroughly decent guy.

His introduction of Leeds & Partners, which replace Marketing Leeds and the ‘Love Leeds’ brand was, to put it mildly, hardly an unmitigated success; but the city has continued to enjoy economic growth, regeneration and attract investment during his tenure.

In more recent times, Wakefield has been at the heart of driving the devolution agenda in the Leeds city region. But he seemed reluctant to take the bold step of supporting calls for a city region mayor, and appeared to settle for a watered-down version of Devo Manc for Leeds and its neighbouring local government partners.

It will be interesting to see what change in direction a new leader will bring to the party, particularly in respect of that devolution initiative, which, whatever the result of next week’s election, will continue apace.

Cllr Wakefield plans to remain on the council, and I am sure all those associated with Downtown wish him all the very best for the future.

Tell me lies, tell me sweet little lies

Ballot

“The truth – you can’t handle the truth.” So responded Jack Nicholson to a question posed to him by Tom Cruise in the movie ‘A Few Good Men.’

It is a line that David Cameron and George Osborne would probably articulate to the great British public given half a chance, because it is the very fact that they have been telling ‘the truth’, as they see it at least, that they have not moved significantly ahead in the polls as they had anticipated by this stage of the General Election campaign.

The downbeat message of Osborne and the Prime Minister may paint an accurate picture of where the UK Plc’s finances are, but it is difficult to get anyone particularly enthused to support another five years of hard slog and austerity.

So, with this, the Tories, with almost gay abandon, decided to go on a bit of a spending spree this week, promising a host of positives including Rail fare freezes, £8 Billion extra for the NHS and a big announcement offering everyone in the public sector 3 days off to volunteer during the year, at a cost of – well who knows?

The Conservatives lead when it comes to ‘managing the economy’ is fairly healthy in all opinion polls; but even so these ‘bag of a fag packet’ commitments have allowed Labour to level the charge of a Tory Party scrabbling around for attractive goodies to hand out before the election, without having any clue as to how they will be paid for.

Labour itself is so paranoid about its reputation in managing the country’s finances, that they have put themselves into a ‘triple lock’ discipline over future fiscal policy that was spelt out on the first page of its Manifesto, launched in Manchester on Monday.

Other than protecting the NHS budget and overseas aid, you will go a long way to find any Labour spending commitment worth talking about.

Not quite ‘carry on regardless’ more ‘re -arranging the deckchairs on the Titanic’ would be a fairly accurate description of the oppositions approach to its economic policy offer to the electorate, with the usual rhetoric of hammering those with ‘the broadest shoulders’. An increasingly confident looking Ed Miliband and his would be Chancellor Ed Balls will be hoping that they don’t meet the same resistance to a very similar Labour message trotted out by Neil Kinnock and John Smith in 1992. History tells us that parties that promise tax rises have not fared particularly well in UK General Elections.

The lack of ambition contained within the Manifestos of the only two political parties who can form a government basically demonstrates a realistic view from them as to where we are in terms of public finances. But, it is not a particularly exciting message, and it is failing to turn the voters on.

Instead, for ‘vision’ and fantasy politics, those who have a wanton desire for radicalism over reality have opted to support fringe parties who, quite frankly, can say what they want and promise what you want with no fear of having to carry out their barmy policies. It was a trap the Liberal Democrats fell into five years ago but, unusually for them, it came back to bite them on the bum – no tuition fees anyone?

This time around it is the Greens offering billions of pounds of public spending; Farage’s mob promising to rid the country of pesky foreigners and the SNP building a whole nation’s economy on oil, despite the falling price of the black stuff in recent months.

Between them, the so-called minor parties are currently polling around 35% of the vote accumulatively, which tells me that a significant number of UK citizens do, indeed, prefer ‘sweet little lies’ to the brutal truth. Who would be a politician?

Why devolution will be more important on May 8th

Downtow Manifesto

We are now less than a month away before the country goes to the polls for a General Election that is heading for a very predictable stalemate.

A hung parliament seems almost inevitable, with opinion poll after opinion poll showing the two major parties neck and neck for months now.

I have long believed that the eventual outcome will see us in virtually the same place we are at now, with the Conservatives as the largest party, and the Liberal Democrats doing better than expected. The surge of support for the SNP in Scotland has done for any slim chance Labour had of forming a majority administration. What happens once all the backroom deals and horse trading have taken place is anyone’s guess, but another period of multi-party co-operation is certain.

Also certain is that the north of England will firmly reject the Tories, as will Scotland and Wales, making the political divide across Britain greater than ever.

As democracies go, the UK is the most centralised of any comparable governance structure in Europe, but the Scottish devolution debate has led to a George Osborne led devolution strategy that, thus far, has only really hit his own backyard of Manchester.

An election result that puts David Cameron back in number 10, but that leaves his party without any significant representation either from the north at Westminster or in the Town Halls of Liverpool, Leeds, Newcastle or Sheffield will simply add to the weight of argument for an acceleration of decentralisation and genuine devolved powers to city regions, and potentially county regions such as Lancashire too.

The price for such a shift in governance structures should be elected leaders, or elected mayors (the title shouldn’t much matter), because, quite rightly, no government should concede the sort of powers that Manchester will benefit from without strengthening the democratic accountability of those who will take those powers. There is also an urgent need to slim down and streamline existing local government structures.

As we argue in Downtown’s ‘Manifesto’ we are currently trying to deliver a 21st Century economy with 19th Century structures, and this has to change.

The discussion and debate as to what that change should be will begin in earnest on 8th May. Downtown is looking forward to being part of that important conversation.

Get on the phone…

Phone

Communication is and always has been one of the most important elements in a successful business, weather that be internally or with customers.

We communicate to our external audience in a variety of fashions, through marketing and advertising campaigns, the company website and in more recent years and in increasing numbers through a range of social media platforms.

On a day-to-day basis, what method do you most use to have a conversation with your team or your customers? My guess is that it is via email.

The email has replaced the telephone as the main communication tool in business- and even in our personal lives we are as likely to get a text message from a friend or loved one, as we are a telephone call.

This change isn’t new, and hasn’t happened overnight; but it is accelerating, and in my view is having a detrimental effect on our ability to communicate effectively.

I went into a meeting in Leeds on Wednesday afternoon for an hour and a half. When we had finished, I looked at my mobile device (it is much more than a phone these days) and I had just one voicemail – but my inbox showed an incredible 129 emails!

Many of them were crap that I was able to delete fairly quickly. I don’t mean ‘junk’ as in invitations from Eastern European women to ‘make friends’ with them. I mean crap as in emails from colleagues who think it necessary to CC me into stuff in order to have a paper trail that covers their own back.

But also buried in this avalanche of correspondence, there was some important stuff too, including invitations to television debates; a request for an introduction from one of our sponsors and information about forthcoming business support programmes and the next round of ERDF funding.

The challenge I have nowadays is to pick out the important stuff from the crap and then try to respond to it in a timely manner – and it is a challenge I am finding increasingly difficult to deal with.

Of the 129 emails that I received in that 90 minutes on Wednesday, over half of them were unnecessary; another chunk of them were at best for information purposes only; and then there were at least a dozen that would have been far better dealt with by a quick telephone call.

We are losing the art of verbal communication. Even when you walk down the street these days you will walk past someone you know without even noticing as your head is bowed reading the latest barrage of content that has been emailed, tweeted or text to you.

As for using your mobile device to actually phone someone, do you do that as often as you should?

My team don’t. In particular my sales team don’t. After Easter they will, so expect to get an actual telephone call from one of the Downtown team – and have a conversation with them ‘voice to voice’ rather than ‘electronically’.

‘Get on the phone’ will be the new mantra I will be using in our office from now on. The bombardment of email has created a wall of noise that is no longer penetrating your customers. Downtown has taken note. You should too.

Happy Easter!

Is Liverpool happy to just be Manchester’s playground?

IFB Mipim

Last week I referenced an event I had attended with Manchester City Council leader Sir Richard Leese. Among the many great insights he offered into the success of his city was his analysis of how Manchester used to be marketed.

“We were very good at marketing ‘fun’ Manchester” he said. “But we needed to find a way in which we could promote corporate Manchester, and demonstrate why it was a place to do business and invest.”

It is a point that Liverpool’s leadership may wish to take account of as it plans its next business growth strategy. Because, for all of the improvements, regeneration and enhancement of reputation the city has undoubtedly enjoyed in the past decade, there is a concern among some of us that we are focussing a little too much on ‘fun’ Liverpool and not enough on the commercial offer.

Liverpool can proudly boast that it is now the best visited city in the UK outside of London and Edinburgh. It can evidence a track record of putting on a great show through events such as Capital of Culture and the giants. Our hotel, bar, restaurant and hospitality sector is quality. The Arena has been an unqualified success. But it is now time to move on, progress the agenda, and invest a little less in ‘fun’ and a bit more in the business of the city.

This was a topic I picked up on at Downtown Liverpool’s post MIPIM forum on Tuesday morning; and it has also been highlighted by the Think Tank led by former Liverpool Walton MP Peter Kilfoyle.

In his report ‘Damage Limitation on Devolution’ Kilfoyle argues that “often Liverpool is content with its new label as a party town, a place where people go for a stag night or hen party. Whereas once it was a great and important commercial centre, it is now happy to build ever more apartments for transient investors, rather than create jobs and houses for its deprived communities.”

I can only subscribe to a small part of this narrative, as I know how hard the city’s business and civic leadership is working to win jobs and investment, but it would be fair to say that Liverpool is now perceived more cultural than commercial. If the city wants to be front and centre of the Northern Powerhouse, then that has to change.

First off, we need to look at how we better manage the limited resources available and find a way of putting additional cash into economic development, business support, policy and research. That means a long overdue conversation about merging Liverpool Vision with the Local Enterprise Partnership; and reviewing the wisdom of huge spend on ‘showcase’ events such as the giants.

I’d rather see a Million pounds invested in policy and business case planning than on a three day ‘fun’ festival that may generate short term cash and a feel good factor, but leaves little behind in way of economic growth and legacy.

Liverpool City Region has much to learn from our friends at the other end of the M62 – but the starkest lesson for now is that government in Westminster, of whatever colour, will only hand over the cash when you can guarantee a Return on Investment and present a business case for additional resource. Saying ‘It’s not fair’ is just not good enough anymore.

As Sir Richard Leese said, having ‘fun’ is great; but having a job is often a pre requisite to enjoying yourself!