View Site Map Skip to main content

Looking forward to a bright 2025 for the Western Gateway

As we approach Christmas and the beginning of the New Year, the Western Gateway faces an uncertain future in 2025.  At the end of what has been a bumper year for the partnership, deputy director, Steph Jary, looks back on the year to reflect on its successes and what might come next.

 

How do you sum-up 5 years of collaboration, vision and evidence-building, investment and ultimately delivery, into a less than generous 250-word box to demonstrate impact? And how do you present the scale of what might be at risk without us and without any immediate solution to replacing the cross-border relationships which are driving economic growth?

That was the situation the Western Gateway found itself in at the beginning of the month.  After a successful year which saw the launch of our independent commission to explore the potential for tidal energy in the Severn Estuary, the first cross border “Plan for Sustainable Growth”, over £100m invested into our geography to develop our low carbon energy park, and our largest pan-national convention yet, this wasn’t the news we’d hoped for.

Since then we’ve been bowled over by the support we’ve received from business, industry and local authorities all ready to get behind the Western Gateway to show why this partnership is the area’s key vehicle for delivering on the UK Government’s key mission to create economic growth.

The Western Gateway region is forecast by Oxford Economics to have the fastest growth outside of London (1.4% per annum in GVA growth from 2024-2029) if it can be allowed to continue collaborating at scale.

This research was also clear on the dangers and threats to predicted growth, and that the potential £250bn of economic growth by 2050 Western Gateway has worked on with partners in Our Plan for Sustainable Growth would not happen without removing some key barriers:

  1. Currently there is a lack of coherent and resourced approach to telling the sub national economic narrative at scale.  Inability to then link sectors and regions/places to the national stories resulting in a cacophony on the international stage – the Western Gateway already has the support locally and regionally to convene and collaborate at scale to build consensus needed to drive investment.
  2. Local Authorities remain under-resourced and with insufficient oversight of the entire area ecosystem to promote economic development unsupported – for a relatively small cost, the Western Gateway can pool resources across South Wales and Western England to deliver true transformational opportunities we need to get our economy on the right footing.
  3. There is currently no easy and single route to investment deals available or outward promotion.  Many local authorities have their own pipelines, other organisations have additional/differing pipelines resulting in multiple disparate spaces wasting time/energy and making this part of the UK too difficult to do business with – through working with LAs and DBT, the Western Gateway can help develop a central pipeline for investment to cut through the noise and help to attract new investment.
  4. Cost of capital requires a coherent solution across sectors and investment types.  Much of what our current innovation does, or will eventually, needs capital and it is much harder to access due to risk appetite, novelty etc.  This is particularly true in energy and build as huge infrastructure issues, particular with Grid, add costs that cannot be easily/readily covered.
  5. Clusters and sectors cut across administrative boundaries but many funds, where they are place-based, arbitrarily stop at boundaries making access and utilisation tricky.  We need to be sophisticated enough to support the intersection of sector, supply-chain and place to make the best of them all and not just follow the easy money or arbitrary maps.
  6. Connectivity, without digital and physical connectivity growth would stumble and would be uneven in terms of where the benefits would fall. Our Rail Vision represents the first locally supported cross border plan for improving public transport which recognises the potential of our full economic geography.
  7. Emissions, the area needs to reduce emissions, both to tackle Climate Change and to continue to attract ESG conscious investors. Without the cross border collaboration the Western Gateway provides, huge opportunities like harnessing tidal energy and delivering floating offshore wind in the celtic sea, will take longer to deliver and will hamper our efforts to reach national targets.

Whilst not quantified monetarily, the research was explicit that without these issues being addressed growth would be weaker, or fail, largely due to the lack of investment.  Of the seven barriers listed, Western Gateway is, or had planned to, address all of them and in the case of 1, 2, 3, and 5 we are the only entity capable of addressing them at present, having the expertise, scale and reach to do so.

The UK Government’s Devolution White Paper earlier this month remained silent on cross border collaboration, instead focusing on the role that English Mayoral Combined Authorities might take supporting collaborative “pan-regional” working.  This does not address the opportunities we see for our area’s natural economic geography which have the support of our local authority leaders.

As we look to 2025, we remain confident that the cross border working the Western Gateway has enabled will remain critical for our area’s continued economic success.  We continue to have positive conversations with representatives from business alongside UK and Welsh Government and look forward to what potential the next year might hold!

All that remains is to wish everyone who has continued to support the Western Gateway this year a Merry Christmas and may there be many more!

Newsletter Sign-Up Form

Collaboration with Western Gateway is just a click away

Contact us
Image of a bridge across the sea