Alistair Houghton meets KEN DAVIES, chief executive of Wirral Chamber of Commerce

KEN DAVIES says businesses must work with the education system to make sure the credit crunch of today doesn’t cripple the businesses of tomorrow.

Davies is chief executive of Wirral Chamber of Commerce, which represents 400 members from window cleaners to multinational companies.

The Chamber is now focused on helping companies cope with the impact of the recession. Wirral, like the rest of the region, is having to cope with rising unemployment as businesses of all shapes and sizes lay off staff.

Earlier this month, for example, Tulip Foods said it was planning to close its Bromborough plant with the loss of more than 300 jobs.

The Chamber has formed an action group with Wirral Council that meets every month to decide how the local authority can help firms struggling through tough conditions.

But Davies also has a long-term goal to encourage more young people into business. He wants to promote links between businesses, schools and colleges to promote entrepreneurship.

He said: “One of my passions is encouraging young people to see entrepreneurship as a career path. We have to be talking to schools and educators.

“One of my biggest fears about recession is a loss of confidence in business. People need confidence to start a business.

“Unless we’re careful, that loss of confidence could be the biggest long-term loss we have.”

The downturn is unsurprisingly dominating Davies’s workload, and he says things will get worse before they can get better.

“The economic situation has overturned everything,” he said.

“Twelve months ago, I didn’t factor in to the business plan that this is what we’d be doing – but chambers of commerce are flexible beasts.

“Interestingly enough, we are currently, because of the financial situation, being asked for more talks with our large businesses.

“When times get more difficult, the big companies are taking the opportunity to do a lot of housekeeping and look closely at their processes.

“That will be very rapidly passed down the supply chain. We’ll see a lot of small businesses who have not felt the pinch yet feel it very quickly.”

Davies welcomes the Government’s moves to support the banking and other sectors, saying that with such an exceptional set of economic circumstances the Government needs to step in.

BUT he says there is no simple “one size fits all” central government model that can help the entire country. Early last year, many commentators suggested this recession would hit the South and its banking and service sector hardest of all, but, as redundancies have continued to mount in retail and manufacturing, it has become clear that the North also faces a harsh economic winter.

“What’s obvious at the moment is that the North is going to be hit financially far more than the south again,” said Davies. “The NWDA and other should be lobbying to ensure the government approach is heavily weighted towards the North.”

Davies lives in Heswall with wife Heather. They have two sons and two grandchildren, and he describes being a grandfather as the best job he’s ever had.

He left school at 15 to join the Liverpool Daily Post and Echo as an apprentice.

“I thought I wanted to be a journalist, but when I’d been there for a little while I realised that I was much more interested in the commercial side, particularly in circulation.”

That interest took him to the Wirral News Group, where, at 22, he became the North West’s youngest newspaper circulation manager.

From there, he went on to the magazine division at Associated Newspapers before joining the new company backed by Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum that in 1986 launched the Racing Post newspaper. He set up the whole promotion, sales and distribution network for the north of England.

Ten years ago, Davies was asked to take the helm at Wirral Chamber, which was looking to expand the services it offered and find new sources of revenue.

“I think it’s fair to say there’s no chamber in the country that can exist entirely on subscriptions. We developed contracts and services, and we did that fairly effectively. We deliver services that businesses really want.”

The Chamber offers a range of support services, ranging from export advice to disseminating information to its members.

Davies is proud of the organisation’s crime reduction programme. Its Pub Watch and Shop Watch programmes have helped build relationships between licensees, retailers, the police and Wirral Council. Each organisation has its own radio network to help members stay in touch.

Violent crime in and around Wirral pubs has fallen 76% since the launch of Pub Watch. The Chamber itself issues banning order to keep persistent troublemakers out of the county’s pubs.

In its lobbying role, the Chamber campaigns on topics including the abolition of Mersey Tunnels tolls.

“We don’t lobby lightly,” he said. “If we campaign for everything, then people stop listening.”

Davies says businesses also want to see decisions on major regeneration schemes made more quickly. Regeneration plans for New Brighton, for example, have taken years to come to fruition.

He warns that if plans are held up, then developers may think again about their investments and regeneration opportunities could be missed.

“The problem with Wirral is that we take too long to do things.

“Businesses don’t have the luxury of time. If a business makes an investment it needs to make a return in a reasonable amount of time. If regeneration takes two years, it takes too long.”

alistairhoughton