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hitting the campaign trail

When he penned the words “it’s better to travel hopefully that to arrive”, Robert Louise Stephenson had clearly never sat in a traffic jam in Dyce trying to get from the airport to his office in time for a meeting. These days commuters don’t so much spend their time travelling hopefully but rather they travel, hoping desperately that they will arrive sometime.

Over the past year and a bit, a little thing called the recession has commandeered our attention, stamping its unwelcome mark over everything we do and try to do in business.

Now, while it’s not yet gone and it’s certainly not forgotten, it has loosened its stranglehold on us, freeing us up to turn our attention once more to our favourite pet hate – transport.

Leaving aside the glip which the R word brought us, transport issues both at local and national level pretty much continue to be of greater concern and irritation to members than any other issue affecting business in the North-east.

That’s why this Chamber has committed to making 2010 the year of our transport campaign. Over the course of the coming months we’ll be working with transport partners right across the city and shire and the rest of the country to raise awareness of the issues which cause the biggest problems for our business community.

Some of those issues we seek action on will be at national level – the need for a third runway at Heathrow, the call for a commitment to be made to bring High Speed Rail to Scotland for example and on those, our strength and our focus will be to continue to pressure government as part of the powerful British Chambers of Commerce network.

At local level, our first step is the consultation which we are currently carrying out with partners involved in the various forms of transport – as providers and users – to identify what they see as the key issues and to determine how we can work together to achieve change and improvement.

To support that, we have formed a steering group with representatives from across the transport sector, creating a panel of experts who will each bring their own experience to the group in terms of what the issues are and how they might be achieved.

Within the next few weeks we will move on to the next stage, the official launch of the campaign which will begin with a focus on one or two issues which we will build on and add to over the next 12 months.

One of the most important elements of the whole campaign will be the input from members. The gathering of information and feedback from you will be ongoing so it you have an issue you would like to raise and haven’t yet done so, we invite you to send your views to kate.yuill@agcc.co.uk or call 01224 343913.

12th Oil & Gas Survey

The Chamber’s 12th Oil & Gas Survey, sponsored by McGrigors has now closed and the results are being analysed by the Fraser of Allendar Institute who carry out the survey on our behalf. This survey included a section of survey questions on R&D and export.

The results will be published next month.

Royal Mail Collection Charges

The BCC is following up on information it has received that suggests that the cost of having Royal Mail collect post directly from a business has increased dramatically over the last few years.

They would be interested to know whether members have experienced a similar rise in their collection charges. Please send any information to me at the above contact details.