At a recent meeting of Norwich Chamber Council, members received an infrastructure update from Tom McCabe, Interim Director for Environment, Transport and Development for Norfolk County Council. He outlined the progress on the NDR, the A47 improvement campaign, Better Broadband for Norfolk’s improvement project and the Norwich in Ninety campaign.
Council members also provided an overview of how the economy was starting to improve in Norwich. RG Carters advised that they were seeing an upturn in construction with a mix of residential and public spending. Arnold Keys said that the commercial property market was performing well and they were seeing investors starting to review their property investment portfolios. The residential market was also picking up.
Hugh J Boswell were cautiously optimistic, trading well, and seeing growth of 6%. Similarly, Naked Marketing were also doing well, their turnover for the year was up and they had a long order book. They also advised that they would be looking to recruit another member of staff as well as an apprentice this year.
Birketts provided an update on employment regulations. Since new regulations came into effect in November 2013, introducing fees for bringing an employment tribunal, there has been a significant drop in employment tribunal cases of between 60% – 70%. They also noted that as of 1 April 2014 there would be mandatory ACAS conciliation requirements for employment disputes.
John Lewis, Norwich advised that they had not seen the traditional drop in sales in January. As a result, they had retained six of the temporary Christmas staff on permanent contracts. Their online sales were also up by 20% and their fashion sales were also picking up.
Caroline Williams, CEO of Norfolk Chamber confirmed that Chamber members’ overall feedback was that they were beginning to feel more optimistic, although still cautious. Businesses were still not investing heavily, but there were signs of more confidence in recruiting staff.
