India’s Commerce Minister Piyush Goyal met UK Secretary of State for International Trade Anne-Marie Trevelyan for the launch of India-UK Free Trade Agreement (FTA) Negotiations on January 13, 2022. In a tweet, Mr Goyal said that deliberations will be held over an array of trade opportunities of mutual interest benefiting both sides.
One region in the UK that’s getting the lion’s share of benefits of the UK-India FTA is the West Midlands. Mayor Andy Street is extremely thrilled about it. In an exclusive interview with Asian Voice, he spoke about what’s in store for the region within FTA, Commonwealth Games 2022 and issues concerning ethnic minorities.
Free Trade Agreement
Speaking to the newsweekly, Mr Andy Street said, “The secretary of state's been out in India this week. I'm very optimistic about the FTA. I hope it will be done relatively quickly with political agreement at both Prime Ministerial levels. I think the West Midlands has more to gain from this probably than any other region in the country. It's why we set up the West Midlands India partnership because we really want to polish this relationship that's going well anyway. The reason for that is our economies have a sort of symbiosis to them. We’re very strong in some of the areas like automotive India is growing fast.”
The West Midlands Mayor is excited about companies like Infosys being a part of the Westmidlands India partnership. He said, “I think the technology in those areas can be shared. Of course, we going to see more investment from India. We're very optimistic there'll be further investment from Infosys. They've been brilliant in their investments so far, but I think there will be more other companies that we are looking forward to.
“Of course, one has to start with Tata. Remember, the single biggest private company in the West Midlands is India owned. And they are investing enormous sums in the future of the electric vehicle industry in the West Midlands. So that's lucrative. And we've had a couple of other real success stories. We've seen TVS Invest in motorbikes, and it's just fantastic to see that brand come back. The work we're now doing with Mahindra, we hope that will come off as well in that sector. So there's quite a list of companies in that area that we hope will take advantage of the easing of the terms of trade.
Checking unemployment
Street had recently announced that the region created about 61,000 new jobs, which may sound like a small number on paper, but executing that is a mammoth task. He said, “Let me be very modest and appropriate. I haven't created them. The region created them. To put numbers in perspective, in the West Midlands, as a whole, we lost about 75,000 jobs during the pandemic. So what this is saying is that we are nearly back to the number of jobs that there was before the pandemic. The number one priority is to get that number back ahead of the pandemic, so we can resume the growth line that we were on.”
Measures to deal with a health crisis
With the ongoing pandemic and health care crisis at the NHS and shortage of staff across Britain, when asked how the region is coping with it and what measures are being put into place, the Mayor said, “We do look at a number of key measures. We look at the employment rates, the proportion of our people in work, it's down just very marginally nought point 4%. On pre-pandemic, we look at our claimant count numbers, we can see how that's gone up during the pandemic. We're also looking at the unemployment rate the activities, I've got lots of measures. But the simple way of describing this is - we're just a little bit behind now, where we were at the beginning of the pandemic, we need to get back ahead of that. For the whole of the decade, 2010-2020, we were the fastest-growing region in the country outside London. Our objective is to get back to that position.”
The Mayor added that his administration is trying to put in place particular retraining schemes for their people who've fallen out of work in some sectors, which are shrinking, and thinking about getting into new sectors.
“So whether it be retraining in the digital boot camps that we've set up or some of the construction training programs, we've just set up programmes with the healthcare sector, where we've got short, and we call them sector-based work academies for the hospitality sector to get people into basic skills. Because the basic point here is that we want people who are currently claiming benefits to move in probably to an entry-level role. Then, within their sector, they can advance right up to the top,” he further added.
Creating jobs and fighting poverty
Mentioning two really big investments that will directly deliver jobs for the region, Mr Andy Street talked about the high-speed tube line between London-Birmingham-Manchester. “We're looking at there for at least another 3000 jobs in the West Midlands in the next two years, with just one company. So that's the incredible concentration with one company, Balfour Beatty Vinci,” Street told us.
For the Commonwealth Games this summer, West Midlands will have about 35,000 jobs during the actual games itself. “We're looking for about 6000 people to get skills that they can use them beyond,” the Mayor said.
Addressing poverty within ethnic minority communities in the West Midlands, when asked if he’s aware of the data, Mr Street said, “Yes, we do. We do know that we have a disproportionately high number of children growing up in poverty. And in, particularly in the cities in the West Midlands. I think Birmingham is the worst as a proportion of their youngsters grow up in poverty. I'm acknowledging, yes, it is a really important issue here. It is very important because it almost becomes a determinant of future achievement. So what we're trying to do, is actually, through all of our skills and training work is to give people higher aspirations, because that's obviously ultimately the way out of that poverty situation. We're also trying to deal with some very practical issues on the ground. So this whole question of help with fuel bills, that's important, because that's a huge source of poverty in this country.
“Also, what we're trying to do, is just a very practical thing that I control directly - keeping the cost of our public transport down, for people who have jobs but relatively low paid jobs, the cost of getting to and fro from them is a significant proportion of weekly expenditure. So I'm very pleased to say that for five years, we've not moved forward without public transport, that bus fares in the region, and we've actually reduced monies deliberately because we know that that is a higher proportion of expenditure for people who are closer to poverty than others. So we can do some direct things ourselves.”
