Firstly, a massive thank you to everyone who has already registered to join us for our first All Partner conference on Friday, 24 November at The Ridgeway Centre, Milton Keynes.
We have around 200 people coming along for what plan to be an action-packed day of discussion about the priorities for pan-regional partnership and future plans.
We have six workshop themes taking place throughout the day, led by Partners. Below I provide more detail on these.
I look forward to seeing many of you on 24th.
Dr Richard Hutchins
Managing Director
As a reminder please do head to our Partnership information page for more on our current work programme. If you haven’t yet signed up to the conference, please do so. We will be closing registrations shortly, especially as some workshop sessions are already over-subscribed.
Workshop sessions
Green Innovation and skills workshop, led by Arc Universities Group
Universities are anchor institutions in the Oxford to Cambridge region and the Arc Universities Group (AUG) is a prime contributor to the regional economy. The region’s colleges and universities are pivotal to the green innovation and skills agenda, instilling competencies, skills and know-how among their students and within our communities.
This session will examine how we can champion existing successes in green skills, innovation and entrepreneurship; distil the value-add of our collaborations between government, academia and industry; and accelerate the green skills agenda for the region’s needs.
Following a set of short prompts from key figures, the session will invite contributors to explore opportunities for better coordination, scaling up and the targeting of effort towards the region’s needs. With substantive momentum behind the green economy internationally, we will explore how the Oxford to Cambridge region might be showcased as a world class exemplar of sustainable economic development and investment.
Delivering approaches to integrated water management, led by the Environment Agency
Integrated Water Management (IWM) focuses on approaches which can provide beneficial outcomes to more than one aspect of the water cycle (water storage, supply, demand, wastewater, flood risk, and water quality) whilst also providing wider benefit to the environment and society.
It isn’t an additional step in the process; instead, it seeks to bring together and better coordinate existing ways of working and planning mechanisms to better enable a more holistic approach to decision making, spatial policy planning and investment.
Focusing specifically on the Oxford to Cambridge geography, our participative workshop will summarise the work of the EA IWMF programme to date and invite your input to help identify gaps and opportunities, validate interim project outputs, and share your views on how we could together meet your expectations and ambitions for the water environment.
Question time: our future transport, led by England’s Economic Heartland
How can we improve our transport system to support economic growth, net zero and enable people to lead happier, healthier lives?
This ‘Question Time’-styled event will see England’s Economic Heartland’s Chair, Oxfordshire County Council leader Cllr Liz Leffman, overseeing a panel of experts including EEH Managing Director, Naomi Green; Milton Keynes City Council’s Cabinet Member for Climate & Sustainability, Cllr Jennifer Wilson-Marklew; and East West Railway Company’s Programme Sponsor, Liam Brooker.
This is your opportunity to quiz our panellists about a range of topics, from maximising opportunities from investment in East West Rail and rapid transit, through to improving bus services and ensuring electric vehicle charging infrastructure keeps pace with demand.
Local Nature Recovery Strategies, led by Natural England
Local Nature Recovery Strategies (LNRS) are a powerful new tool that will help the public, private and voluntary sectors work more effectively together for nature’s recovery and enable collective effort to be focussed where it will have most benefit.
Natural England would like the Partnership’s stakeholders to help shape join up between LNRSs across the Oxford to Cambridge region, with particular focus on sharing examples of successful cross-boundary working and developing a series of Principles for Ways of Working across the region’s LNRSs.
This will be an excellent opportunity to network with others interested in the LNRS process, as well as have an important say regarding how we can all support delivery of LNRS in the Oxford to Cambridge region.
Creating opportunities through data, led by the Partnership’s Data lead and Better Futures
The Partnership is working to create a regional data observatory, with plans for an embedded data analyst service to support Partners with, among other needs, their investment business cases.
At this workshop, we seek your input into making sure that this Observatory delivers for you so come prepared to talk about:
1) your priority data and research need for your organisation, particularly those you cannot access currently.
2) the functionality and/or features you would like to see.
3) the specific data or evidence you would want in the data portal.
4) And, fundamentally, what questions about our region’s economy and environment should we be looking at the data to help us answer?
Creating the region’s investment prospectus, storyboarding our global investment narrative, led by ekosgen.
ekosgen, in collaboration with Avison Young, Glass AI and OPEN, are leading on the development of the Oxford to Cambridge Region’s Investment Atlas and Prospectus on behalf of the Partnership. This seeks to articulate the scale of opportunity in the region on a global stage to secure Foreign Direct Investment.
In this workshop, we want to listen to your views on the key attributes (strengths, assets, capabilities) which are of a significant scale and have global traction to narrate in the Prospectus. The value of these assets should be considered through the lens of innovation and environmentally progressive and inclusive development.
Your input will support the development of a regional prospectus that tells the story of the value of assets, the positive impact these create and, provides a compelling joined up offer which speaks to foreign investor audiences about the scale and breadth of opportunity in the Oxford to Cambridge region.