Cllr Peter Butlin, deputy leader of Warwickshire County Council and Coventry and Warwickshire Local Enterprise Partnership board director, said:
MIPIM is about many things – development, investment, establishing new links and making new contacts.
But the strength of Coventry and Warwickshire’s presence at the show also proves to me that MIPIM is also very much about partnerships.
Partnership working has been talked about in the public and private sectors for years, but quite often it has been that – just talk.
If you take Coventry and Warwickshire, just a few years ago we operated as separate entities on a political level.
Business, of course, does not really recognise those boundaries, but politicians and funders have to. It is the nature of the beast.
But something has fundamentally changed in our area in recent years, and MIPIM emphasises it very clearly.
The formation of the Coventry and Warwickshire Local Enterprise Partnership meant that for the first time we had to sit down together, we had to look at common aims and we had to act with unity.
The “we” includes the public sector, the private sector and education. As a small LEP by national standards, if we did not act with cohesion, we would fail.
That has clearly helped forge new and stronger relationships. There are, I am sure, deniers but there is no getting away from the fact that what happens in Coventry has a direct impact on Warwickshire. Conversely, as well as sharing major commercial interests such as Jaguar Land Rover, Warwickshire has a huge array of assets which are of benefit to the city.
I chair the Planning and Housing Business Group of the LEP, where property professionals and local authority representatives are working for positive development right across the C&W area, and where we have now established a string of practices which are common across all the local authorities.
As those relationships have grown stronger, we have seen the rewards in the form of developments such as the new UKBIC development and the announcement of Meggitt’s new headquarters building at Ansty.
The massive achievement of Coventry’s success in bidding to be the UK City of Culture was celebrated by many of my Warwickshire colleagues at the Belgrade Theatre on decision night. That simply would not have happened a few years ago.
At MIPIM we are part of the UK Midlands presence, again a clear example of where partnership has brought real advantages. It was a point not lost on metro mayor Andy Street as he welcomed the Midlands’ strongest contingent to the four-day event.
The marketing literature which has been produced for C&W at MIPIM, emphasises a string of impressive recent successes
I am sure that, working together, that is just the start.