Thursday, January 9 – A meeting of leaders and chief executives of the county’s seven main councils and representatives from Gloucestershire Police and the NHS.

With the draft of the Strategic Economic Plan for Gloucestershire published and submitted to the government just before Christmas, this meeting saw the next steps in setting up of the Gloucestershire Economic Growth Joint Committee. It will include the seven council leaders with a remit to oversee the plan and its progress. Sounds onerous, but this major strategic plan is critical to our future economic growth and requires a furrowed brow. You can view the plan at www.gfirstlep.com The past week has seen much publicity regarding the campaign to remedy the ‘missing link’ on the A417 and this is one of the key infrastructure projects identified in the economic plan. Gloucestershire residents are being encouraged to endorse the campaign at www.a417missinglink.co.uk Such a project will require the government to commit £250 million to fix the notorious bottleneck on one of the county’s primary routes. The proposal is to build a new ‘loop’ road and we need to act now to hit the next funding round. At a more local level, one of the key projects in the plan is the Gloucestershire Renewable Energy, Engineering and Nuclear Skills Centre (GREEN) to develop skills, in partnership with Stroud and South Gloucestershire College and major national and international suppliers, in the engineering and nuclear sectors. It is seen as a “once in a generation” opportunity to make the most of the decommissioning of the nuclear facilities at Berkeley to build skills in nuclear and green and low carbon projects.

Thursday, January 16 – Feedback

A week on from the above meeting, we met with the GFirst LEP, the county’s local enterprise partnership, to be presented with initial feedback from the government on the aforementioned economic plan. I’m pleased to say that overall it was positive and encouraging. We now need to make suggested changes and improvements to fine tune the plan before the final version is submitted for approval in March. As mentioned above, it’s worth a look at the current draft online.

Friday, January 17, Business breakfast, Ebley Mill

Around 40 representatives from business, education and the voluntary sector attended this briefing as did local MP Neil Carmichael. It covered the council’s spending plans, our housing programme, an update on the canal restoration, the local plan, waste and recycling and, coincidentally, the issues mentioned above. If you’re a local business hoping to work with the council we’ll soon be publicising contracts on the South West Business Portal. Take a look at www.supplyingthesouthwest.org.uk if you think this may be of interest. I’ll update you know when we go live.