I spent the best part of a fortnight going through Norfolk’s economic development record line by line. Contract values, apprenticeship data, retail vacancy figures, board membership, the lot. I’ve spent 35 years building businesses, from growing Kick Sportswear from £350,000 to £8 million, to founding Business Shaper Group and supporting over a thousand companies since. I know what a genuine economic strategy looks like, and I know what it looks like when a council dresses up inherited institutions and fluffy language as ambition. This week at Scrutiny Committee, I put both records on the table.
Thirteen years, £350 million, and no answer to a simple question
Norfolk’s economic development department, the LEP, the Business Board, and the Growth Hub weren’t created or directed by the current administration. It goes back to 2011, and we’re still relying on them today – the Business Board, the Ambassadors programme, and the 2024-2029 Economic Strategy were all set up by the previous administration before it left office.
So here’s my simple question. Over £350 million in government funding went through New Anglia LEP, leveraging a further £1.3 billion. Grants for capital expenditure at 20% grant, 80% funded by the business, all linked to employment. To this day, nobody has published a Norfolk-only breakdown of what any of it actually achieved; every figure is a combined Norfolk-and-Suffolk total. The National Audit Office itself found that government never evaluated whether the near £12 billion spent on LEPs nationally represented value for money. Thirteen years of activity, and we still can’t say for certain whether it worked.
We need strong baseline numbers to know where the start line is and can we tip the dial by implimenting a staregy that actually worked!
Apprenticeships: the numbers don't say what the press releases say
Norfolk’s apprenticeship starts grew by 2.78% this year. National growth was 4.1%. And every bit of Norfolk’s growth came from the 25 year old plus age group, up 13.6%, while starts for 16 – 18 year-olds fell 6.9% and for 19 – 24 year-olds fell 2.75%.
I’ll say what I think plenty of people are already thinking: how many of that 25-plus group are university graduates who’ve discovered their degree doesn’t lead to a job, dressed up in the statistics as apprentices? That’s not what apprenticeships are for. They’re supposed to be a first career, not a fallback.
And here’s the bit that should embarrass us. Norse Group, wholly owned by this council and one of the largest employers in Norfolk, employs just over 100 apprentices out of many thousands of staff. It doesn’t even spend its own apprenticeship levy on its own people, it pays money into the Levy Support Scheme instead.
If our own company won’t back its own apprentices, what exactly are we asking the private sector to do?
High Streets Matter. We don't even know where we're starting from!
The council talks about vibrant market towns. There’s no baseline vacancy data, no footfall monitoring, nothing. Norwich is the only place in the entire county with a published retail monitor, and it shows city centre vacancy at 16.3%, rising for two years running, with footfall down since May.
So I went and counted my own. Wymondham has approximately 50 shops, 4 pubs, one closed and one only just reopened after 12 months shut, 2 vape shops, 2 hairdressers, 2 Turkish barbers, 4 charity shops, 9 takeaways, and at least 9 empty units.
If we can’t tell the committee what a healthy high street looks like versus a struggling one, how can anyone claim the programme is working?
We need initiatives that work. Initiatives that have a starting point backed up by real data and a finishing point that shows the needle has significantly moved and proves that our programmes really work and improve the status quo.
The Business Board: three founders out of eighteen
I also looked at who's actually running our Business Board. Of eighteen members, only three have a genuine track record of building a business from nothing. Not one of them chairs it. The rest are hired executives, academics, charity and trade body leaders, and serving councillors.
Running an established institution is a real and valuable skill. It is not the same discipline as taking the risk to start one.
It isn't for lack of talent, we have it in abundance in Norfolk
None of this is because Norfolk lacks ambition or ability. We have genuinely exciting things happening here: cutting-edge technology, a gaming industry earning national recognition, cutting-edge R&D, Akcela incubating our leading tech businesses, ex-Silicon Valley programmers choosing to build here, and Connected Innovation delivering, by its own figures, a return on investment above the national average. What we’re missing isn’t talent. It’s a strategy that backs it properly instead of talking over it.
Protecting our female firefighters, and a wider question about who gets the contract
The second issue I raised was Norfolk Fire and Rescue’s own action plan, which commits to upgrading showers and changing facilities for female firefighters at every station by April 2027.
That’s the right commitment. But the wider Fire Station Improvement Programme that would actually fund it was paused by the previous administration, and the specific action for our female firefighters is rated amber, at risk, against its own deadline.
This is happening at the same time NFRS has just recorded its busiest month in its history, a 26% rise in incidents year on year. Our firefighters are working harder than ever, and some of them still don’t have basic dignity in their own changing rooms. That’s not good enough, and I said so.
I also raised a broader point while I had the floor. In my own experience, and from cases raised with me directly, smaller maintenance and building projects that go through our framework suppliers, including Norse, can end up costing significantly more, in some cases reportedly several times more, than the same job tendered to a local Norfolk firm. If that’s true even some of the time, it deserves a proper, transparent review before we assume the framework route is always the value-for-money route. I’ve asked for exactly that.
