City Council leader Jon Collins argues that he has the right vision for Nottingham, in an exclusive interview with Mark Patterson...

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SOME might argue that the TV series Coppers has offered a reasonably valuable and candid insight into the nature of frontline policing in Nottinghamshire today.

Although two incidents of police behaviour seen in the series have been referred to the force's own professional standards board, while other episodes have also revealed a fair amount of police swearing and flatulence, the Channel 4 series has, arguably, shown the county's PCs and WPCs as human beings dealing with everything from the usual night-time drunks to violent anti-police hatred.

And what's wrong with showing viewers what policing is like?

For Nottingham City Council leader Jon Collins, everything. Collins, who has been leader for nine years, has made no secret of the fact that he thinks Nottinghamshire Constabulary made a mistake in helping Channel 4 make this series because of its possible adverse impact on Nottingham's image.

And with Nottingham still being the butt of jokes for its past reputation for gun crime and high crime rate in general, one can perhaps understand the leader's sensitivity on the issue – especially when he is also chairman of Nottinghamshire Police Authority.

So why didn't Collins try to stop the programme from being made? He laughs and then says: "It would have been had I been asked. And if I'd been consulted I would have given the response I've given since, which is that when the force has been looking into doing other programmes like that, and I've found out about them, I can see no purpose in doing it, no benefit, and actually some consideration of the views of partners would be good."

So there you have it. He wasn't asked. But what has this got to do with business? Well, perhaps everything, since improving Nottingham's 'positive promotional messages' is one of 40 proposals in the city council's draft economic growth plan. Launched last month at the grandly titled Nottingham Business Summit, the plan appears to be pro-job creation and seemingly tailored to suit both the government's general agenda to stimulate private sector enterprise and the specific bespoke economic powers which Nottingham is set to gain under a new Government policy called City Deal.

The powers being sought by Nottingham will cover areas such as transport, superfast broadband, college vocational training and a new apprenticeship funding scheme and Collins expects to have these powers lodged with Government next month.

"It's something I know [Minister for Cities] Greg Clarke wants to take to cabinet and have in place for the next financial year," he says.

Yet for all the pro-business stance of the city council, and the proposed policies to support the private sector, Nottingham's recent record in this area is not good. Immediately before the business summit a report was produced by the think-tank Centre for Cities which claimed that Nottingham lost more private sector jobs in 2009-2010 than 60 other towns and cities in Britain – out of 64 locations surveyed,

Nottingham also ranked 49th for business start-ups.

How can 'positive promotional messages' hide or explain away data like this?

Obviously, people in business do not expect their local council to take a lead in job creation but they do tend to want their local authority to create an environment where businesses can grow.

So, on the basis of the Centre for Cities report, does Collins accept that the authority has failed to create the right environment for business?

His immediate response is one that the city council regularly deploys when faced with bad news – that the city is the most 'underbounded' in England which means the figures do not offer a fair comparison with other cities.

By underbounded, he seems to mean that Nottingham has a large conurbation and yet reports like this are often based on statistics drawn from the much smaller core area covered by the city council itself.

It is pointed out to him that the Centre for Cities report drew on statistics from Broxtowe, Gedling and Erewash as well as the city council area. And that anyway, the figures for private sector job losses still aren't very good no matter how you argue about boundaries.

"The context is that the economy as a whole is struggling at the moment and inevitably in a recession jobs are lost and they fall differentially on different sectors," he responds. "It's very much around looking at which sectors at the moment.

"I mean, in terms of where I think Nottingham is, I think like most cities we're facing a whole range of challenges and certainly the balance between public sector and private sector jobs is one of the challenges we have to look at. From my point of view, trying to support job creation, business creation and making sure that we're supporting companies, is a part of what we should be doing."

It is put to him that nevertheless Nottingham still doesn't have the entrepreneurial culture it needs to foster lots of creative new enterprises and become attractive to inward investment. Isn't developing this kind of hard-to-define milieu, rather than attracting call centres and warehouses, the key to real, sustained economic growth?

"Ok, I think we need both – I don't think we should be sniffy about attracting jobs from any quarter frankly," says the leader.

"We helped set up BioCity so it's clearly something we're very keen on. We were working with Westfield, now we're working with CSC over future redevelopment of Broadmarsh and we're not standing on the outside of that because we have a major stake in that. You look at how much money we've put in to science parks and collaborations around education and training. What I would say is we've got a pretty reasonable track record of looking across all sectors and taking opportunities when they arrive, and backing business and entrepreneurialism."

The conversation stays with Nottingham's overall economic direction. Does Collins think that Nottingham's inward investment policy and overall economic direction has placed too much emphasis on retail and services – areas which, although important as sources of employment, are also vulnerable because they rely on growth in other areas of the economy and people having money to spend?

He doesn't agree with that, no, and indeed emphasises that the authority sees growth potential in many other sectors such as biotechnology, centred around BioCity, environmental technologies, science and digital media.

"It's really important that we're not focused on just one area or one specialism or one big idea," he says.

"In terms of local authority policy we have some resources and we do have the ability to market and the ability to work with other organisations and agencies.

"We're part of the LEP [Local Enterprise Partnership covering Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire], poor replacement though it is for Emda, (East Midlands Development Agency) so we do have an input, and having a view about what's important and what we want to promote is part of what we should be doing."

Hang on, that sounded interesting. What's wrong with the LEP?

"The LEP has no staff, no resources and basically has about £17m of Growing Places fund to allocate out and that's largely loans. If you compare that with the resources that Emda had…

"But it's not just in terms of money to allocate; it's in terms of the skilled people who were there and the focus they brought to business across the East Midlands and enterprise and development.

"You look at the sector work they used to do. There's just no comparison. They're on a completely different level.

"In some parts of the country RDAs were not fantastic but I think Emda was a very good organisation that delivered a lot."

Part of Collins' argument against LEP, and for Emda is his belief that the old regional RDA, which was quickly scrapped by the government upon entering office, had at least helped to give the relatively poorly defined 'East Midlands' a proper standing among other English regions.

Now, with an underfunded LEP coming in to serve a region where even the airport has an identity problem, Nottinghamshire and the region are in danger of missing out on Government recognition and funding.

So the council leader doesn't have much faith in the LEP, then?

"It's early days – we'll see. But at the moment the level of resourcing is only a fraction of what's available.

"In the big pot of money that's been created, £1.5bn for the Regional Growth Fund, the East Midlands has hardly had a look in. One of the things about having an RDA is that we got a formal share of the resources that were available for economic development activity.

"We might have argued about the share, but we had a place at the table. Before Emda was there the East Midlands used to get overlooked.

"Were we part of the West Midlands? We were lumped in with East Anglia. Isn't part of the East Midlands looking towards Manchester or Sheffield? So we got squeezed out. And we're going back there. Government departments are beginning to forget that we exist in the East Midlands and that is a real challenge.

"We constantly have to push and push ourselves onto the agenda in a way that, frankly, Birmingham and the West Midlands, Sheffield and Yorkshire, Leeds and West Yorkshire, the North West, Manchester and Liverpool, the North East and Newcastle, don't have to do.

"There's that sense of people knowing where they are. But the East Midlands…?

"We've got an airport that doesn't even know where it is. It's one of the big issues that Emda resolved because there it was, the East Midlands Development Agency, there's the area, there's the focus, there's a chunk of money, £200m per year and it's been replaced by a LEP that has no staffing, no on-going resources and for a third of the whole region, £17m."