News & views

16 July 2018

Popular summer lunchtime event allows LBV members to meet the two new faces at BID Leicester and the Leicester and Leicestershire Place Marketing and Inward Investment team

On Friday 6 July 2018, we held one of our regular lunchtime networking events at Nelsons conference centre at New Walk Leicester.

For LBV members, it was a first chance to meet the recently-appointed Simon Jenner, BID Leicester Director and Mark Oakley, Director of Inward Investment and Place Marketing at Leicester City Council – who were our guest speakers.

Jane Cowley welcomed guests to the event and then Simon Jenner gave a short presentation on developments at BID since the postal ballot in which 85% of businesses voted in favour of establishing the city’s first BID.

Simon highlighted their primary aim of adding “additional” input into the city centre area from their £4.2 million budget and acting as a voice for their 750 plus business stakeholders. Simon was excited to report on the progress of recruitment into the team and the appointment of 3 of the 4 proposed ‘Street Ambassadors’.

Simon was also keen to emphasise a key objective for him was to keep the project true to its original aims and that spending on admin is held close to 21%, so the majority of the money raised by the BID levy was spent on improving the BID area.

After Simon – Mark Oakley, the recently-appointed new Director of Inward Investment in his first presentation to the Leicester business community, set out his aims for both the city and council.

Mark provided us with a little of his background and the importance of getting the Leicester and Leicestershire name to be recognised globally. He admitted that the recent success of Leicester City and its 13 representative footballers at the World Cup was helping.

Mark also touched on his concerns on the lack of good quality office space in the city centre and the latest on their specific strategies to attract inward investment from China and India.

We then moved on to a lively Questions and Answers session hosted by LBV Board Director, Simon Whitaker when everything from night-time bus service to the treasures of the Lutterworth library Frank Whittle archive were discussed.

Simon Whitaker then went onto give a vote of thanks to Nelsons Solicitors for their sponsorship of the event and kind use of their air conditioned conferencing facilities on a very warm summer’s day.

A well-attended event with over 50 guests, the next lunchtime LBV event will be in September when we shall meet at De Montfort University to discuss graduate talent retention in the city and county.