100-strong delegation promotes Liverpool’s financial clout

Nov 5 2008 by Alistair Houghton, Liverpool Daily Post

As the size of Liverpool’s delegation to London last week revealed, the masterminds behind the city’s financial and professional services sectors have grand plans for growth. Alistair Houghton reports

LAST Wednesday, a 100-strong group of account-ants, lawyers, other professionals and civic leaders paid a visit to the capital to promote the Liverpool city region as a place to do business.

It was all part of an initiative by Professionaliverpool to grow the financial and professional sector in the region by more than 50% in the next decade.

Liverpool is already a key finan-cial services centre. Profession-aliverpool’s figures suggest the region already generates £8.3bn of Gross Value Added (GVA) to the economy of Merseyside, Cheshire and West Lancashire. The financial and professional services sector supports 200,000 employees through-out that region.

Professionaliverpool chief execu-tive Mark Chadwick wants to see that GVA figure rise so the sector contributes £13bn to the region’s economy within 12 years. The econ-omic downturn may mean those targets need to be revised, but the ambition remains clear.

Mr Chadwick said: “I have to say that those figures will probably need some qualification on the back of the recent economic downturn and the changing circumstances in financial markets. But we have significant ambitions to grow Liverpool as a centre of excellence in this sector and that will lead to a significant number of jobs in this area.

“Our role is to help promote and foster the right environment for business in this particular sector. So our ambition is simply to help grow the size of the cake. We don’t want a circular distribution of the same funds in Liverpool city region, we want the cake to be bigger.”

The Lord Mayor of the City of London acts as a worldwide ambassador for the UK’s financial services sector.

Ian Luder officially becomes Lord Mayor on Friday. His first official visit outside London as Lord Mayor will be the return visit to Liverpool later this month. That trip is being organised by The Mersey Partner-ship and the North West Develop-ment Agency.

In his speech at his official Man-sion House residence last week, he was full of praise for Liverpool’s success as a financial services sector.

Mr Luder said Liverpool had the “confidence, ambition and energy,” to grow its professional services sector.

He said: “Liverpool is the third largest asset, pensions and wealth management centre in the UK, it remains the leading stockbroking environment outside London and has a strong and vibrant legal sector specialising in maritime and insur-ance law.”

He added: “Liverpool is a signifi-cant financial centre in the UK and I admire the ambition as described to grow its financial services and professional sector to £13bn GVA.”

Mr Chadwick said: “Liverpool has an excellent offering but in my judgement it hadn’t been doing enough to raise its profile in the City of London, which is only three hours away. The City of London’s Lord Mayor spends a great deal of time travelling abroad during his year of office. It’s therefore really important that Liverpool makes him aware of what it has to offer.

“We had some very lively discus-sions with a number of people about the importance of Liverpool as a financial and professional services centre. Very rarely do we roll out the professional middle classes to make our case and it’s important that we do that.”

The London trip saw dozens of Liverpool professionals travelling to the Mansion House, then onto Westminster.

MORE than 100 people attended the Mansion House lunch, most of whom had travelled down from Liverpool. Virgin Trains gave free first-class return tickets to the whole delegation.

“The reason for the size of the delegation,” said Mr Chadwick, “was largely down to the enthus-iasm of the people who were invited and associated with it.

“We had a large number attend because we took a large number of people from Liverpool and because we had a lot of people from the City of London who had been invited who were keen to hear what Liverpool was about these days.”

Mr Chadwick and Profession-aliverpool’s backers are not expecting major commodities brokers or finance houses to sudden-ly up sticks and move from London to the North West. Instead, they hope to attract a share of any new investment that comes in to the UK.

Mr Chadwick hopes that, if those investors suggest opening other bases in the UK outside London, the name of Liverpool will be at the tip of Mr Luder’s tongue.

He said: “You have to be realistic. Mr Luder’s principal responsibility is to promote the City of London. Nothwithstanding that, he does have the opportunity to promote the regional centres.

“We wouldn’t expect him to be encouraging a shift in terms of copper trading or commodity exchanges to Liverpool, but certainly when he sees an opportunity in China or India or the United States or any other region he may visit during the course of his office he will have a better understanding now and subsequently after his visit to Liverpool in November of what it is that we have to offer.

“He will therefore be better placed to promote and sell Liverpool as an alternative regional centre.”

alistairhoughton