Vince Cable opens new £50 million business park in Burnley
Vince Cable opens the new government-backed Burnley Bridge Business Park and visits some of Burnley’s most successful manufacturers.
The Business Secretary Vince Cable is opening the new government-backed Burnley Bridge Business Park today (27 February 2014) and visiting some of Burnley’s most successful manufacturing companies.
In his speech at the site of the new business park, the Minister is expected to praise the “spirit of enterprise” that the project represents.
It is the largest new development on the M65 corridor for more than a decade, and is expected to create more than 1,400 indirect jobs in the area. The 70-acre site is a £50 million development by Eshton, a Leeds-based commercial property investment and development company, which has received a £2.4 million loan from the government through Lancashire’s Growing Places Fund.
Once completed, the park will be served by a new bus route linking it to the centre of Burnley, ensuring excellent accessibility to the town.
Business Secretary Vince Cable said:
It is encouraging to see the growth that is taking place in Burnley. It has weathered the years since the financial crash well and manufacturing in the town is now enjoying a real renaissance.
Today (27 February 2014) I’ve seen first-hand how the government’s industrial strategy is giving businesses both here in Burnley, and all over the country, the confidence to invest, securing highly-skilled jobs and a stronger economy.
The Business Secretary will also visit 4 of the town’s manufacturing and engineering firms to see the success of some of the area’s fastest-growing companies:
-
Velocity Composites, a high-tech aerospace company that, in 5 years, has grown from 3 to 70 employees. Velocity received £86,000 government funding through the Regional Growth Fund (RGF) to support a move to larger premises on Bancroft Road. The move is expected to create 25 new jobs in Burnley
-
Kaman, a major American aerospace business, and the first company to move onto the old Michelin site. The move has been supported by the Burnley Borough Council RGF Programme, and is creating 39 new jobs on the premises
-
Vince Cable will be officially opening a new £5 million extension at VEKA, a window systems manufacturer. VEKA has increased staff 15-fold in 30 years and won ‘Business of the Year’ at the 2013 Burnley Business Awards
-
AMS Neve, a multi-award winning manufacturer of professional audio equipment that has supplied technology to some of the world’s leading musicians and film studios
Notes to editors
1.The government’s economic policy objective is to achieve ‘strong, sustainable and balanced growth that is more evenly shared across the country and between industries’. It set 4 ambitions in the ‘Plan for Growth’, published at Budget 2011:
- to create the most competitive tax system in the G20
- to make the UK the best place in Europe to start, finance and grow a business
- to encourage investment and exports as a route to a more balanced economy
- to create a more educated workforce that is the most flexible in Europe
Work is underway across government to achieve these ambitions, including progress on more than 250 measures as part of the Growth Review. Developing an Industrial Strategy gives new impetus to this work by providing businesses, investors and the public with more clarity about the long-term direction in which the government wants the economy to travel.
2.Burnley was voted the UK’s most enterprising area in the government’s Enterprising Britain Awards in 2013.
3.In 2012, manufacturing accounted for 22% of jobs in Burnley.