Alistair Houghton meets DAMIAN WATERS, North West regional director of the CBI

HE’S a veteran at snapping the UK’s shyest creatures, but now Damian Waters is trying to track down the rarest best of all – a sign the UK is on the road to recovery.

Waters is the North West regional director for business lobby group the Confederation of British Industry (CBI) – but also runs his own wildlife photography business, Drumimages.

During the working week, Birkenhead-born Waters spends most of his time out and about meeting business leaders across the region.

But, at weekends, the father-of-two relishes swapping his work suit for wellies so he can take pictures of animals from red squirrels to deer.

“I’m a bit like Clark Kent,” he smiled.

“I go from wearing a pinstripe suit to wearing camouflage gear, lying in a ditch, trying to take a picture of a brown hare or a red deer. It’s a very different discipline.”

Waters has been the CBI’s regional director for eight years. The group, whose slogan is “the voice of business”, has some 4,500 members in the North West. Those members have had a tough time in recent years – and they are telling Waters that things are not improving quickly.

“At the start of the year, people were generally quite optimistic and buoyant,” he said. “We’re at the point now where people are saying that it looks like a long road to recovery.

“I hate to use a cliché, but it’s going to be a slow uphill struggle.

“Someone said to me a couple of weeks ago that they’ll know things are getting better when they stop letting opportunities go by.

“At the moment, people have just got their heads down and are focusing on making their business successful on a week-to-week basis.

“They are perhaps not looking for investment opportunities. And it’s those opportunities that will make the economy start growing again.

“Confidence is a tricky thing to generate. From the man in the street’s point of view, they hear lots of messages about difficulties in the economy and they don’t go out and spend.

“It’s difficult. There’s no magic pill, no button you can press to restore confidence.”

The CBI, Waters is keen to stress, is not just for big business.

“Yes, in my portfolio I’ve got United Utilities (UU), which is the only FTSE-100 company in the North West,” he said.

“But there’s a great variety in this job – you can be sitting in UU’s Lingley Mere headquarters for one meeting, and then the next meeting could be at a start-up in a semi- detached house where there’s two people sitting around a Mac.”

Last week, Waters enjoyed one of the highlights of his year – the CBI’s North West annual dinner.

The event, at Lancashire Cricket Club in Manchester, saw BBC director-general Mark Thompson pledge that the MediaCity UK complex in Salford Quays would mean “mouth- watering opportunities” for North West creative firms.

MediaCity may be in Salford but the development, which will house six BBC departments, could offer a bonanza for Merseyside firms.

Waters said: “It’s not about the physical location – it’s about the opportunities in the marketplace.

“It would be a shame if people thought parochially and said ‘It’s Salford, there’s nothing for us there’.

“There’s a lot of creative businesses in Merseyside that should be knocking on the door.

“It’s not just the BBC there – it’s ITV, and the University of Salford. There’s a whole bunch of opportunities for people to get involved.”

Waters was born in Birkenhead and grew up on the town’s Woodchurch Estate.

After Birkenhead Institute – where, by his own admission, he struggled with his O-Levels and A-Levels – he studied for an HND at Wrexham’s North East Wales Institute, before completing a business degree at the University of Central Lancashire, in Preston.

“I took a long-winded route to get my degree,” he said. “But I got there in the end.

“It taught me that people will help you in your life but fundamentally, when push comes to shove, you’ve got to help yourself. Nobody is going to give you O-Levels.”

Waters’s first experience of the world of work was a summer job on a North Wales farm.

“Seeing farmers work makes you appreciate what hard work is about.”

His first full-time job was at Eastham oil refinery, Wirral.

“No disrespect to the places I studied,” he said, “but I learned more in my first six months of work than in four years of HND and degree study.”

After spending some time in North Wales, working at a plant making ribbons for typewriters and dot matrix printers, he joined Merseyside Education Business Partnership in 1994 to help forge links between schools, colleges and businesses.

In 1998, he joined the CBI as its assistant director for Merseyside, Cheshire and North Wales. And, in 2003, he became regional director.

“We want,” he said, “to make sure people understand what the business issues are, what business contributes to society, and how business generates wealth for the UK.”

Waters says that, above almost anything else, businesses want to see consistency from government.

He said: “George Osborne has done well in setting out his position on corporation tax – it will reduce over five years. Collectively, businesses said ‘this is a good decision and we’ll be able to plan’.

“But there are some positions on which they’ve changed their minds, when businesses have made plans based on the Government’s position.

“For example, the feed-in tariff (to support the renewable energy sector) changed, and it made business decisions uneconomical.

“It’s another cliché, but it’s like moving the goalposts at half time. If we’re going for growth, we want to have consistency.”

Waters is concerned that the loss of the Northwest Development Agency (NWDA) will disadvantage some parts of the region: “We have no referee,” he said. “The NWDA is a good referee to make sure that the sub-regions in the North West get a fair stake.

“It’s a bit like taking a referee out of a rugby match. For the first 15 minutes, people will play to the rules, but then it ends in a mass brawl.

“The region has become a bit directionless. All the different parts of the region are doing their own thing – there’s no over-riding strategy.

“We have the new Local Enterprise Partnerships, but businesses are scratching their heads, asking what they are going to do and how are they going to do it.”

Other issues regularly raised on Waters’s travels include rising commodity prices and skills shortages.

“Some skills are about attributes, not things you can show on a piece of paper,” said Waters. “It’s about having the right attitude to become an effective part of the workplace.”

Waters is also concerned about the fate of 16-24-year-olds who are not in education, employment or training – those who are, in the jargon of the public sector, known as NEETs.

“If you’ve not had a connection with education or the world of work,” he said, “it’s hard to get back into it.

“We are concerned that there is a whole generation of young people that could be meeting these skills needs, but is outside the system.”

Waters, who lives in Greasby with his wife and two children, has been interested in photography since he was a child. But, a decade ago, he decided to turn his hobby into a business, Drumimages.

“I’ve worked in businesses and been part of a large organisation,” he said.

“But now I’m running my own business, doing the invoicing, the marketing, everything. The only employee is me – I’m chief cook and bottle-washer.

“So I’ve got a lot of empathy for people who run small businesses.”