NEWS about the economy has been relentlessly downbeat for months now, with rising prices, job worries and serious concerns about the future of the eurozone combining to leave consumers and businesses mired in uncertainty.

While we don't know when things will get better, there will come a point when conditions do improve. And how quickly they improve depends partly on how ready businesses and the places they operate from are to move forward.

For Nottingham, there are a number of encouraging signs on the city's economic drawing board.

The first lies in the fact that businesses and local authorities have signalled that they are working together to identify what steps they can collectively take to make the city a better place to do business in.

The Nottingham Economic Growth Plan will not be finalised until April, but we urge businesses of all shapes and sizes to contact the city council and make sure they have a say in what it can do for them.

The second encouraging sign is already well-known but bears endless repetition: the scale of the upcoming investment in Nottingham's transport infrastructure through the tram, the railway station and the widening of the A453 is almost unprecedented – not just in its scope, but in the potential it offers to build on the city's reputation as a well-connected location.

Expansion of the tram in particular could improve Nottingham's connectivity in more ways than one. The city council is in the throes of a bid for money from a Government fund which would help pay for the installation of high-speed digital cables. While other cities would have to dig up their streets specifically to lay the cables, Nottingham plans to build them into the new and existing tram lines.

We will find out in next month's Budget if we have been successful. One way or another, Nottingham is heading for a better-connected future.