Doing Business in the Thames Valley

It has been a good April, culminating with our Annual Dinner on the 24th. The timing was perfect. The event coincided with the publication of the Doing Business in the Thames Valley supplement published in the Financial Times.

It is the first report of its kind in the national press that has appeared about our region, and it was an impressive issue, setting out the vital importance of the Thames valley to the British economy, and containing more than a dozen articles profiling various sectors, and a number of individual firms and business leaders.

I was delighted to see our long-standing friend, Jim Braithwaite, chairman of SEEDA, quoted on the front page as saying ‘the Thames Valley is the engine room of everything we do’.

The FT also several times reinforced our core message – the need for an immediate improvement to the transport infrastructure in the Thames Valley, including a direct fixed link to Heathrow Airport.

The Financial Times is the worlds leading business newspaper, and its messages carry with government. While there has been very little movement from central government, there has been some progress in that the region is now starting to speak more forcefully with one voice, and we also have support from SEEDA.

At the dinner I announced the launch of a poster campaign, designed to draw attention to the absence of a rail link to Heathrow. All our members have copies, and you will soon be seeing them on Great Western railway stations. The poster headed ‘Put the Thames Valley in the Loop’ has been designed by a brilliant young artist James Dawe, who only left college two years ago but who has had work published in newspapers like the Sunday Times and in the Grand Central Station in New York.

If you would like a copy of the poster to display, please contact me at shaun@thamesvalley.co.uk

In the next few months we will be doing more work on the link to Heathrow. As you will know, our support for the expansion of the airport is conditional on this link being built.

I know many people would like to see Heathrow downsized, but that is neither sensible nor practical. What is sensible is to make it a better airport. The extra runway is not needed to increase the number of flights – there is only limited scope for that- but to ensure that existing flights can be operated more efficiently, with fewer of the delays that are caused by its present operation at over 95% capacity.
We want congestion and pollution to be reduced, not increased. That is why we argue for a fixed link to the Thames Valley – by train or monorail – and if that means that some of the ‘legacy’ American carriers with very old planes no longer fly to Heathrow, so be it.

Most of us still think a circular rail link from Reading to Heathrow via Slough and returning via Staines and Bracknell is the best option, but there is increasing interest in the monorail, which would track the motorways, and operate as a Skytrain above the airport, in much the same way as the successful venture at JFK in New York.

We shall be looking at the feasibility of this in coming months

Shaun Whittaker