Biz Extra
(L-R) Stephanie Fosh, Sam Sainsbury, Zoe Colbeck, Don Iro, Jenny Nolan, Alan Lindstrom, Anh Stewart, Leigh-Sara Timberlake, Claire Hughes, Peter Taylor, Stephen Emerson
Published: October 30, 2023 | Updated: 31st October 2023
Hampshire Biz News’ first-ever roundtable discussion between Hampshire business leaders highlighted the need for greater collaboration to drive future prosperity in the region.
While strengths like the ports of Southampton and Portsmouth were acknowledged, participants raised concerns around infrastructure limitations, talent retention, support for SMEs and startups, skills development, and achieving net zero emissions.
Tapping into the lucrative cruise industry and improving the visitor experience in cities like Southampton were identified as missed opportunities. More partnerships between businesses, industry organizations, academic institutions, and local councils could boost innovation across sectors like maritime, defense and technology.
Collective lobbying of the national government for infrastructure investment and favorable policies was also suggested. Developing the local workforce and making the area attractive for talent will be critical for sustaining growth.
With Hampshire home to over 6,000 startups and business incubators nurturing new ventures, the ingredients for success are there. But realizing the county’s full economic potential will require strategic collaboration, a shared vision, and leveraging collective strengths.
By working together, Hampshire’s diverse business community can drive inclusive growth, remain resilient in the face of challenges like Brexit and COVID, and solidify the region as a leading hub for sectors like ports, defense, and technology.
Taking part were:
To kick us off, Peter Taylor pointed to some of Hampshire’s historically successful sectors.
Peter Taylor
“Going back, there’s been three key elements, one being the Port of Southampton – the amount of commerce that has come through Southampton, both import and export, is immense.
“Portsmouth, in terms of its national role as the home of the royal navy, with defence historically being hugely important for an island nation such as the UK, and you can see its importance starting to surface again.
“And then you also have the creative and cultural sectors. We’ve got cultural assets throughout the county and particularly in and around Winchester. Those things combined create a compelling reason for why Hampshire has been as successful as it has.”
Leigh-Sara Timberlake
Leigh-Sara Timberlake was keen to point out that, while Hampshire has been successful, there’s still a lot of areas which need attention.
“I think the perception is that because we’re just outside of London, everything’s quite easy for us. But I think there are some really big challenges, particularly around talent, infrastructure and connectivity.
“We need to work more collaboratively, both as a county and with our neighbours, which would strengthen our resolve – particularly with the government.
“The port is great, but it is still behind those dock gates so do we all have an understanding of the benefit of the port? I’m not sure. Case in point is the freeport – it’s a great opportunity but I think we need a better understanding of the benefits to all.”
Sam Sainsbury
This was where Sam Sainsbury gave some insight into his experiences leading a marine business in Hampshire and his perspective on the freeport.
“We were looking at different funding, and when we spoke to someone from the freeport, it seemed to me to be a very closed off place which only really benefits the big names sitting inside of it. There didn’t seem to be anything for a growing business like ours to take advantage of.
“It would be interesting to understand more about it – if there is more to understand.”
Don Iro was keen to point to the economic benefits of the port, while also recognising there was still more to do to capture and promote this – particularly around the freeport.
“Historically the ports, and the supply chain beneath them, have driven a huge amount of work. Everything in this room, other than our bodies, have come through the ports in some way.
“I think we need to do a bit of retrospective capturing of that activity, as its contribution should be in the tens, if not hundreds, of billions.
“I think the Freeport is very high-level conceptualised at the moment. If you did a survey across Hampshire, you’d probably get maybe one percent of people that say they actually understand what the freeport does and what it contributes to the economy.”
This talk of the ports, and what they contribute to the economy, naturally moved the conversation on to cruises, and the tourism trade which comes into Hampshire through the ports.
Leigh-Sara said: “We’re the cruise capital of Northern Europe, but I feel we can be a bit complacent about that at times.
“They have fireworks when a cruise ship comes into Liverpool – it’s a celebration. At the last count each turnaround contributed around £2 million to the economy, purely by visitors getting on and off.
“That’s serious money, but I’m not sure they have the best experience navigating our region as they perhaps could have.”
Jenny Nolan picked up this thread.
Jenny Nolan
“When I was working in the visitor economy in Portsmouth with the Spinnaker Tower, I worked quite closely with the ports, and it was an ongoing challenge.
“I was there for ten years and one of the first meeting I was in was about ‘how do we capture that cruise audience?’ because the trend was they would get off the ship and jump in a coach to London or Stonehenge.
“When I left, we were still having those same conversations around how do we get them to stay, using our hotels and visiting our attractions.”
So how can this be improved?
Leigh-Sara explained: “I think Portsmouth now have a cruise forum which they’re using to break down the barriers a bit, arranging excursions and events within the city, and I think Southampton Forward have got some plans too.”
Peter Taylor said: “To improve the visitor experience for those cruise passengers, collaboration is key. The various parts of Hampshire working together could be the key to unlocking this. You’ve got to make it easy for them.”
The group also pointed to a number of areas in Southampton which could do with a facelift, pointing to the areas around the port and the station, recognising that plans are often made then shelved as the priorities of local government change.
The next topic the group moved on to is an ever-present one at forums such as this, skills.
Sam Sainsbury said: “We’re a fast-growing business, but one of the things which is holding us back the most is the talent in the area.
“Maybe we’re looking in the wrong place, but trying to find people who are hands-on is really difficult. Apprenticeships don’t seem to exist anymore and there seems to be a big gap in training people.
“It doesn’t matter how good our maritime or aviation industry might be if we can’t find the people happy to get their hands dirty.”
Alan Lindstrom
Alan Lindstrom commented: “It’s something which comes up at a number of forums we’re involved in. Young people want to be specialists, doctors, lawyers, accountants. We haven’t got the people who want to go out and get their hands dirty.
“Youngsters are not taught that there’s great work, and great incomes, available to them if they work in industry.”
Leigh-Sara pointed out: “I think that can often be down to awareness – I think that some young people don’t know what opportunities are out there.
“In our Maritime and Transport group we’ve got Meachers and Red Funnell, and they can’t find people to drive the trucks or work on the ferries.
“To try and help with this the Solent LEP and the private sector have put money in a pot to employ an engagement officer to got to schools and talk to the children about these career opportunities.”
Zoe Colbeck
As Zoe Colbeck pointed out, however, there is still more that can be done – and companies could be doing more.
“I work for the Solent LEP,” she said. “And there’s an issue actually getting industry to come in and speak to schools.
“The Solent LEP work with 77 of the schools in the region, and they’re desperately short of people from industry who will come in and be role models for them.
“There are some organisations who are doing good work though. Kiwi Education are trying to set up an engineering centre in Southampton.”
As Don Iro would explain, it’s an issue with challenges in both the short term and the long term.
“The short term challenge is that we don’t have the skills right now. The long term challenge can be addressed through engagement with young people and schools, but to tackle this in the short terms we need to attract people from outside of Hampshire.
“I’ve seen some organisations looking for an engineer and they’re offering £40,000. Why would someone come to Southampton for that when they could double it London?
“We need to think about the process to get the right people in. People need to think about this place as somewhere they can live. It’s about connecting with the place-based agenda in the short term to see how we can sell the different parts of Hampshire as a great place to reside.”
Stephanie Fosh
Moving on, the next topic to be tackled was the formation of new businesses, with Stephanie Fosh weighing in on how we can encourage the formation of new businesses.
“I never expected to set up my own business,” she explained.
“It was during the last recession, I was pregnant with my youngest child and I’d been made redundant.
“I saw a space in the market for an HR consultancy supporting SMEs, as I think those with under 250 employees often get forgotten about.
“96 per cent of organisations in this country are micro businesses, but trying to get to 10 people is really difficult. All you get told is ‘you’ve only got a 20-25 per cent chance of making it to five years.
“I think it’s better now with the LEP and other places for support, but when I set up the only place you could go was your bank.
“We don’t teach anything about running a business in schools, and I think that education and support piece is missing.
“We have a generation who look at YouTube and think they’re going to make a million pounds within a year. Their expectations of life are very different from the reality.
“We don’t do enough to help businesses that are under 250 people. I don’t think the issue is in getting people to start their business, the issue is how do we help them sustain it.”
Claire Hughes
With education taking the spotlight, Claire Hughes was keen to point to some of the schemes available to businesses in supporting starts ups and sutainable growth of these SMEs.
“We have Higher Degree Apprenticeships in business, which do cover some of the core areas and we have a range of SMEs and entrepreneurs who undertake these,” she explained.
“There’s also Help to Grow that we run at Solent University which is a national government scheme specifically for MEs and their leaders. The aim of the programme is to support SMEs to gain knowledge across the main business leadership areas but also to work on a specific business challenge they are facing. Through this programme you are allocated . a business mentor and you do peer mentoring, so you’re connected with people in the same situation and learn and support each other
“It runs across 12 weeks as a course and then you become part of the alumni and events that are run. The course culminates in writing up a business planthat provides action points for the business challenge you set out to review.
“So there are programmes out there for SMEs and start ups, it’s just -as it is with a lot of what we’ve talked about today – getting the message out there and encouraging businesses to approach providers.”
Peter Taylor was keen to point to some initiatives in this area which deserve recognition.
“We shouldn’t beat ourselves up too much. As well as the Help to Grow, I think the coming together of Fareham College, Eastleigh College and City College under one umbrella to focus on their strengths is a good thing.
“I’m hearing more and more businesses becoming aware of the succession issue and the need for new talent. I think the new University Technical College is really good news, especially as businesses will be able to directly influence the curriculum for the UTC, focusing on STEM subjects for 14 to 19 year-olds.”
Continuing this theme of positives, the group were next asked to point to some of the organisations in Hampshire currently getting it right.
Don Iro explained: “It’s not just one company, it’s a set of companies.
“Hampshire is quite blessed with a number of entrepreneurs who have their hearts in the right place. There’s around 6,000 startup businesses in Hampshire and you can see a number of hubs emerging.
“We’ve talked about the business support from the universities, which is quite well established. But you also have, for instance, The Old Bond Store, which has around 120 member businesses.
“If you were to quantify this in terms of revenue – which is something we possibly don’t do enough – I would say their contribution is in the tens of millions of pounds.
“Another similar hub is IncuHive. These ecosystems are empowering and supporting businesses. Being a startup can be quite lonely, having these ecosystems empowers founders and owners to work on their businesses and ultimately contribute to the economy.
“You also have events like the Farnborough Airshow – there’s a significant amount of business that happens there, somewhere in the billions.
“These are the people that actually empower and energise our economy.”
One of the hottest topics on everyone’s lips at the moment is AI, and what it means for jobs and businesses in the future.
Don Iro said: “We should stop calling AI a disruptor, because actually it’s not – it’s a catalyst.
“When you think of those pivotal moments of change, for example from the days of mobile phones to where we are now with everything connected, there was a journey in there from hardware to software to platform services.
“Now, you’ve got what we call AI, which is an evolution from machine to machine communication with machine learning, it’s pushing out outcomes to enable businesses to be more effective.
“A lot of people think technology is about hardware, about giving them another computer, but actually it’s about working the processes that they do backwards and seeing how technology helps them.
“Take a caregiver, they might not be tech savvy. They’re working with their hands, they’re assuring you, reassuring you, they’ve got their hearts, their hands, their voice. So why give them hardware?
“Maybe you give them a microphone, and then AI can be transposing what they’re doing and freeing up time for them which can be deployed into other parts of the organisation.
“Any transformation in an industry comes from within. You’ll have people who have worked in the sector for years and they understand where the pain points are and if you can free up that capacity that would really help the effectiveness and efficiency of your organisation.
“The quicker we adapt to this new technology, the quicker we can stake our claim in the industry so I think we need to be having really bold conversations about what AI can do for us in terms of productivity as opposed to ‘is AI going to take my job away?’.”
Building on this Zoe Colbeck pointed out: “If the Solent Cluster projects get the go ahead, that’s 70,000 jobs that will be retained. There’s AI involved in the processes, but these are all hands-on engineering jobs.
“So, although AI can free up some people to help with other things, I don’t think there’s a shortage of jobs for people. I think the problem is getting them to shift into other things.”
It would be remiss to talk about future visions of Hampshire without tackling what may well be one of greatest, if not the greatest, existential threats of our time – climate change.
Zoe Colbeck had this to say: “The last time the planet was this hot was 45 million years ago, and sea levels were 100 metres higher, so the sea went past Oxford.
“I’m not saying that all of Hampshire will be flooded, but if you extrapolate backwards that’s the sort of thing you might imagine.
“So it’s really important that businesses have net zero plans and are working towards them. All the scientists say, and the UN and the British government has agreed, if you can reduce your business emissions by 90 per cent and then offset the last 10 per cent by 2050, we have a chance of keeping the planet as we know it.
“Otherwise the predictions are that the planet will take itself back and that human life will be massively reduced. That’s according to the University of Cambridge.
“There are some businesses in our area who have really good plans they’re working on as part of the Solent Cluster. ExxonMobil, RWE and SSE to name three.
“It’s also been really good learning from Carnival, who have managed to reduce their emissions by 30 per cent just by changing their routes. And AI can really help with that.
“We’ve got issues in the maritime industry, because we need to know which fuel the ships are going to use long term. And that’s an issue because most shipbuilding organisations will have a 10 year book of ships that they’re building and at the moment that book doesn’t day which new fuel they’re going to use.
“ARENA, helps organise that, just say 10 per cent are going to use E-Methanol, 25 per cent are going to use ammonia, but we haven’t got anyone in the area making E-Methanol, let alone ammonia, so collaboration is going to be really key for everyone to get together and decide what we’re going to do.”
Claire Hughes then outlined some of the challenges associated with tackling carbon emissions.
“It’s a challenging situation for business that needs a balance,” she explained, “ because we need growth and prosperity in the region to ensure revenue to be able to fund some of the programmes which will make this possible.
“It will cost money in the short term but, especially when you look at the statistics and projections Zoe has outlined, the long terms benefits clearly outweigh that.
“One of the other things worth talking about is the circular economy. I know there’s a lot of organisations which are now thinking a lot about the end of life of their products and extension of life of products and what can actually be done with those things. This needs to be built into business planning at every level.
“It’s a challenge. Businesses do need to make money, and profits, but we clearly do need to think about the climate as well and understand the connections between people, planet and proft.”
To finish up, the group considered what can be done to address the lack of quality commercial workplaces.
Sam Sainsbury outlined some of the challenges which impacted his business as they were looking to scale up and grow.
“There’s a huge gap when it comes to a certain size of property, which doesn’t help small businesses trying to grow.
“You have these huge developments which help companies like Amazon. But there are so many small businesses fighting over properties of between 7,000 to 10,000 square feet which, for builders, are not worth it as an investment.
“Land’s gone up so much in price, you’ve got the cost of building supplies which has gone up 200-300 per cent… So nobody wants to build at that level.”
Alan Lindstrom said: “One way of tackling this is through the repurposing of buildings, which has been happening in Southampton and other places.
“But another thing worth talking about is increasing the housing supply, because that has a knock-on effect for industry and industrial use.”
Drawing on her own experience in a university setting, Claire Hughes said: “It would be remiss of me not to bring up, while we’re talking about housing, the lack of student accommodation – particularly for international students coming in who struggle to find suitable accommodation during their studies and beyond.
“This has a knock on effect that if they struggle to find accmondation they may leave the region and we then don’t retain their skills and talents
Leigh-Sara Timberlake added: “We have a housing focus task group within Regenerate South, which both Southampton and Solent University are involved in, and they said they’ve had to turn away 500 students because they can’t accommodate them within a commutable distance.
“So the knock-on effect to the local economy is massive. These are the things we need to bring to central government’s attention because otherwise the perception continues that ‘you’re alright down there, you don’t need help’.
Don Iro said: I think there’s two areas to this. There’s what can be controlled in local government and then there’s central government policy. If you go to any of these planning committee meetings you’ll see how disastrous it is because there isn’t power at the local level to make pragmatic changes.
“We’re seeing a shift in how people consumer property. We’re not starved for properties in Hampshire. The challenge is what you can do with those properties and how quickly can you move them from commercial to private.
“From a central government perspective I think there could be a lot more support in terms of recognising priority areas that contribute to the economy.”
Zoe Colbeck said: “There are things being done. I’ve been impressed with the way Portsmouth has gone about its redevelopment. For example, they forced the people who owned the derelict Debenhams site to sell that, and it’s been turned into retail on the ground floor and flats and a new doctor’s surgery”
