Agenda item - Chair's Communications

27.1      The Chair provided the following Communications:

“On behalf of the Board I would like to welcome Henry Powell.  Henry is the new Chair of Coastal West Sussex and replaces Peter Webb who stood down from the Board at the last meeting in January.  Unfortunately, Henry can’t be with us today and so we welcome Vice Chairman James Dempster in his place on this occasion. We look forward to working with Henry, as the partnership moves into an exciting new phase.

As you will be more than aware the UK is due to leave the European Union on 29^th March 2019, 3 days from now. The Sussex Resilience Forum (SRF) is doing a great deal of work to prepare for any local impacts of the national risks and contingencies arising from the UK’s exit from the EU, including from a ‘No Deal’ scenario. The SRF and the partners who make it up are also working closely with the Government, which is making sensible precautions to ensure continuity in areas including healthcare and transport. The SRF is also working with neighbouring resilience forums across the South East. 

The Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy has launched the business readiness website which includes a tool to enable businesses to find out further information on how to prepare, industry specific information and changes to rules and regulations. More information is available at: https://euexitbusiness.campaign.gov.uk/

On 22 March the Adur Tidal Walls were officially opened at an event hosted by Sir James Bevan, Chief Executive of the Environment Agency.  Sir James led on the formalities before delegates were taken on a tour to view part of the 7.2km of completed flood defences.  This essential infrastructure work will protect over 2,300 residential properties, around 170 commercial properties, and also protect other key infrastructure including the railway, local roads and the airport.  It will also unlock strategic sites for the delivery of much-needed new homes and commercial space.

On 7^th March, I opened an extremely interesting event organised by Coastal West Sussex in partnership with Willmott Dixon and held at Ricardo. The ’Prosperity through Innovation’ event featured presentations from Savills on the housing trends, from City Fibre on the economic benefits of Full Fibre, from Willmott Dixon on the challenges in the construction industry and how they would like to work with local authorities and LCR property on some successful major regeneration sites. The event closed with a discussion and the audience using ‘slido’ to ask questions of the panel experts.

The Greater Brighton Economic Board, in partnership with the IMEX Group, is hosting a unique event this Thursday 28^th March at the AMEX stadium. This event will explore how we can grow our city region’s economy by better defining our distinctive global City narrative in terms of civic innovation and placemaking. The urban development and city branding advisor and Chairman of The Business of Cities, Prof. Greg Clark CBE, will be joining us to: developing a compelling proposition and identity for our city region, explore civic innovation and the transformation economy, identify locations and business sectors to foster growth and attract talent, better leverage our visitor economy to drive this economic development.

I look forward to seeing you there.