SOMETIMES, factors beyond your control can blow away even the best-laid plans.
Retailer Ethel Austin blamed the snowfalls at the start of the year for its collapse. It couldn’t continue to trade when shoppers decided to stay indoors.
Erupting volcanoes fall into the same category of bad luck you can do nothing about.
A lot of airline executives are currently twiddling their thumbs hoping that Eyjafjallajökull stops spewing its ash all over Europe before their bankers become jittery. The pressure being created by the volcano on businesses that are already only marginally profitable could be unbearable. BA comes to mind.
The nation’s flag carrier is a business that has not made a worthwhile profit in recent times. Hopefully this won’t be the last straw.
There are various estimates for the cost to business of the disruption caused by the volcano.
Liverpool Chamber of Commerce and Industry said the cost to Merseyside has been around £18m, or £3.6m a day. Peel Airports, which owns Liverpool John Lennon Airport, puts the cost to it at £150,000 a day, while the Centre for Economic and Business Research calculates that the national daily cost is £230m.
The airlines and some airports are lobbying to have the guidelines about travel restrictions reviewed, implying that they are being too onerously applied by Europe’s aviation regulators. Volcanoes erupt in other parts of the world, such as the Philippines and Hawaii, without causing disruption. Some airlines, including BA, Lufthansa and KLM, have flown test flights to “prove” their aircraft won’t be damaged by the ash.
But it doesn’t matter whether BA can fly a jumbo to Cardiff safely. That’s just one flight. There are 25,000 flights a day around Europe and it would only take one of them to fall out of the sky for the blame game to start.
There is an interesting conflict here between severe commercial pressures and safety. Fortunately, we seem to have a robust enough system of governance in place to ensure that safety takes precedence. Long may it last.
A STUDY by the University of Wales Institute, Cardiff, has concluded that Liverpool is the least competitive big British city in which to do business.
The institute’s researchers looked at issues like the educational qualifications of the workforce, skills levels, pay, business density and business start-up rates, among many others.
Worse still, they insist there is a link between the lack of competitiveness of a place and the performance of businesses based there.
I’m not so sure that this assertion is altogether true. For example, low pay might be attractive to some businesses as it would help to keep their costs down.
Many won’t be surprised by the fact Liverpool does badly in such a league table, certainly compared to, say, Birmingham and Leeds. But it is disappointing that we do worse than places like Sheffield, Nottingham and Newcastle. Surely Liverpool can beat these places.
Knowsley does even worse. Out of 379 local authorities, it was ranked 375th in the Institute’s competitiveness table. Liverpool was 298th in that table.
The research also makes clear that the rate of improvement is slow. According to the university’s research, the cities and locations that were struggling when New Labour was first elected in 1997 are still struggling today.
