Thanks, Stephanie and good morning. It’s great to be here today and welcome to Leeds and to Yorkshire, all of those of you who haven’t been here recently. Apologies for the weather – it’s the only day it’s rained this week. Our new economic strategy in a few years time, I think, is going to be building an ark, if we carry on as we are. But, despite the current heavy economic weather, I just want to talk a bit about this part of the world and what’s changed here and how design has been fundamental to that change.
Yorkshire is now a region of economic opportunity, rather than a region of economic decline and that’s a big statement to make and it, it reflects what’s happened over the last ten years. I think everybody knows that, in the last three decades of the last century, we underwent a very painful restructuring of our economy and it affected people, families, communities, businesses, absolutely fundamentally. We were effectively written-off and Yorkshire Forward’s job, as a regional development agency, is to make sure that never happens again and over the last ten years, working with many people who are in this room, we’ve been building a more mixed economy in Yorkshire. We haven’t staked everything on one or two big industries.
We excel in financial services in Leeds and Bradford, advanced engineering in South Yorkshire, the UK’s largest ports hub in the Humber and food and tourism in York and North Yorkshire. And we have critical mass, now. We have ASDA and Morrison’s and Smith & Nephew, Forge Masters, Yorkshire Building Society, all these big, big companies. The new Yorkshire economy is as big as a third of the individual EU member states and half of the states of the USA, with the equivalent of Norway or Singapore, so it makes sense for us to have an economic strategy that reflects that critical mass of 5 million people and a quarter of a million businesses. We’ve grown faster than Europe for seven years in a row and we have done that because we’ve embraced innovation, we’ve embraced design and that’s what I want to talk about.
At the heart of that has been our universities. In Leeds, York and Sheffield, we have universities who invest more in research than Oxford or Cambridge. And speaking of Oxford, I was very pleased, obviously, to hear the Policy Exchange Report which came out, which... you know, and the reaction that happened to that. You’ll be very glad to know that you don’t all have to get on a train straight away tonight and take your belongings and move down to Oxford. Those of you who live in the region, and those of you who live in the South East will be pleased to hear that you don’t have to have a million Northerners running down the M1 and the East Coast mainline to come and live down here, because things are so bad up here. The best thing for us about that report was the reaction to it, which didn’t come from the RDAs, it actually came from most people, generally.
Of course we’ve got more to do and we haven’t solved the great economic challenges we’ve got in places like Bradford and Hull and the critical issue, I think, for, for people like myself and policy makers, is how do we make that leap? How do we enable businesses in a region who, some of whom haven’t traditionally embraced design and have seen it, if I’m honest as, as slightly peripheral to their key business plan and their priorities about the bottom line and about what they’re producing and doing. How, how do we take that leap forward and, in this sort of baffling, sometimes, globalised 21st century economy, how do they transform themselves and how do we get competitive, comparative advantage over so many other regions in the world?
And, the first thing I just wanted to say about how we’ve integrated design into what we do in the region is talk about something called the Advanced Manufacturing Park, which is in Rotherham. Boeing have sited their European research centre there and we do great work with other world leading manufacturers there, basically because of a guy called Keith Ridgeway, who is an expert in Sheffield, who specialises in metal cutting techniques and he has used his expertise and we’ve helped build around him a team that basically looks at the design of manufacturing products and processes and is making huge impact on reducing the time and cost of major processes in the aerospace and related industries. He, as an example, they’ve designed the landing gear for the 787 Dreamliner and it’s as a result of their work, that’s linked to design and linked to this wider view of it, that has made a real difference.
If there are specialists in the room wondering how someone like me gets to know about something like design, what I would say to you is that, in the region, we have some great ambassadors for design. You’re going to hear from one of them today, Jonathan Sands, who’s certainly one of those people who convinced me about what we needed to do to mainstream design into what we did in the region and I’m very grateful to Jim Farmery and Zoe Alice from Yorkshire Forward who were, sort of, ambassadors for design and Stewart MacFarlane’s here as well, I think, within my organisation. They might have to become guerrilla fighters if our budgets are cut any further, but that’s another point.
But I think what I want to do is make clear that the... I think it’s a big moment that, shortly, all the RDAs in England will be supporting this Designing Demand programme, so you’re not talking about just an isolated example of somebody who’s, the light bulb’s gone on and they’ve realised what’s happening here. And I think that’s a big, big step forward and I’ve got high hopes for the Designing Demand programme, because we’ve actually trialled it here and it’s worked.
And you’ll have heard some of the stats from the Minister, but the Design Works project, as we called it, which ran in South Yorkshire, had some tremendous results. We’ve just had an initial evaluation back from it and it basically involved design associates working very closely with businesses in the region. 240 new or safeguarded jobs, £14 million of sales and about 0.8 million of private investment. They’re the sort of stats that send people to sleep sometimes, I’m afraid, so wake up if I’ve just sent you to sleep. The important one for me, was that we did a survey of the businesses who were involved. 97% of businesses expect sales to increase as a result of the work that we’ve done on this scheme. 97%. That is incredible. 90% expect profits to increase, so obviously 7% expect those sales not to be profitable.
But, I think, the interesting thing for me, the other interesting thing, was the wider outcomes that it appears that this scheme and this process is starting to make. A positive shift in business confidence, in procuring design advice, a catalyst for future investment and the development of a range of new contacts and networks, as well as entry to new markets and improved service to customers.
Real examples on the ground – again, I’m conscious of time and I don’t want to go on too long – but just two or three examples. Bank End Farm, a farming business, a fruit farm, David McCallum, who took the business to the next stage, developed an innovative new logo and website, lifestyle photography was used and I’ll just give a quote from him, because he does it better than I can. ‘We’re using the new identity across everything from the café menus to packaging and signage around the site and we’re expanding into workplace fruit baskets and it has really taken our business up a level and given us a more professional image.’
Innerstop [?], another example, a company based in South Yorkshire, again, that manufactures and supplies to the healthcare sector, have made tremendous strides. ‘Thanks to this project, our new identity is as a professional and forward-thinking organisation. We’ve received excellent client feedback and are currently in talks with a large company that is considering making us a preferred supplier.’
They’re the stories, actually, that count. It’s not what I say, or the stats that come out on the piece of paper. It’s those stories about real businesses, real people who have embraced design, used it to improve their company and now you don’t need to go back to them, because it will just happen now. It’s sustainable, what we’re managing to do.
Just in finishing, because I am conscious of time, I just wanted to mention another way in which we’ve tried to integrate design into what we do and into that economic strategy that Stephanie talked about. Has anybody been watching the – this is a risk, this question – has anybody been watching the Channel 4 programme on Castleford, by Kevin McLeod? I see nods and hands go up around. Can I just have hands going up? Yeah, quite a lot of people. Well, that’s not – although we love Channel 4 and they’ve done a great job and I think it was a very fair programme – it wasn’t actually all Channel 4’s £100,000 that made that massive difference. It was a bit of what we did. You can guarantee, if it went wrong, I would have been on that programme, you know, making the point about how it was a risk, but, you know, it was a risk worth taking.
That is happening all over Yorkshire. What we’ve tried to do is make sure that we aren’t in any town in Yorkshire, that we do get to the heart and, if you like, the quote from the Minister about the sort of spiritual aspect of this is quite interesting. What is the future of a town that’s lost its economic reason for being? Well, we’ve used design and we’ve brought in international architects to say things like, you know, Barnsley could be a Tuscan hill market town. Now, imagine saying that to the people of Barnsley. You can imagine the debates that we’ve had, the heated debates, but, actually it has made a difference. Billions of pounds of new investment has come into our region and I mean billions of pounds. In Barnsley, a place that has, you know, had a... was one of the worst places in Europe and was an Objective 1 area – it’s been lifted out of that recently – and it’s the way that the design process can bring together politicians, tax payers, quangos and architects to find a space that enables you to think differently, to challenge what’s gone before and, actually, to come up with something completely different, which can actually have a fundamental impact on the economy.
That’s what design has done for us in Yorkshire and I believe design’s got a fundamental role to play in the next set of challenges that we’ve all got around environmental climate change and diversity and equality. But I’m not going to go on about that, because my time’s up and the final thing I just want to say is, the only way you achieve things these days, is by working together with others. It’s not a command and control society, or government, or anything else.
And so, thank you to the Design Council, thank you to the Minister and to DIUS and BERR, who’ve supported us greatly. Thank you to Business Link, the design agencies and to others. We have a saying here, which is about Team Yorkshire and Humber and that’s how we’ve made it work and thank you for listening.