The Labour Group Leader, Councillor Jim Grant, has endorsed a Centre for Cities report that has asked for greater government focus on addressing the economic challenges facing the UK’s fastest-growing and strongest-performing towns and cities like Swindon, Cambridge, Milton Keynes, Oxford and Norwich.
The Labour Group Leader, Councillor Jim Grant, has endorsed a Centre for Cities report that has asked for greater government focus on addressing the economic challenges facing the UK’s fastest-growing and strongest-performing towns and cities like Swindon, Cambridge, Milton Keynes, Oxford and Norwich.
The report shows that these towns and cities are playing an increasingly important role in the national economy, with all five places enjoying higher productivity levels than bigger cities such as Manchester and Birmingham.
In conjunction with this report these fast growth cities have come together to launch the Fast Growth Cities Group, who will lobby the government in areas of common interest. The launch of this group took place on the 8th March in Parliament. The Swindon Labour Group Deputy Leader, Councillor Junab Ali, attended this event with Swindon Council Leader, David Renard.
The Leader of the Swindon Labour Group, Councillor Jim Grant, said:
“I wholeheartedly endorse this new report and the efforts of these fast growth towns and cities to highlight their challenges to the government.
While politicians in Westminster have been talking about building up a northern powerhouse, it is towns and cities like Swindon that are powering the country’s growth.
I agree with the report’s proposals to give towns like Swindon more freedoms to build homes, such as loosening the borrowing rules to build more council homes and to ask for more attention to develop a higher skills base in towns like Swindon.
But perhaps the most important issue is the government’s need to give more funding for infrastructure to towns like Swindon. So many people in Swindon say that the town’s grown but the infrastructure needed to meet this growth has not come with it and that is where the government could most help.”