Richard Parker, mayor of the West Midlands and chair of the West Midlands Combined Authority (WMCA), has said the region is short of top-class hotels.
Speaking at the UK Annual Hospitality Conference (AHC) on 30 September at the Manchester Central Convention Complex, Parker said more high-end hotels would help encourage more wealthy visitors to stay longer and spend more money in the region.
“We have got to make the place a more attractive destination for people to stay and I’ll be working with council leaders and other stakeholders to do that,” he said. “We are looking at it in a joined-up way, but there is a lot more work to do and we need to address the issue that too many people visit but don’t visit for long enough.”
Parker, who was elected mayor of the West Midlands earlier this year, continued that regeneration and real estate investment had been one of the biggest drivers of growth in the area in recent years.
Although Parker doesn’t have planning power, he committed to doing “all we can” to “streamline planning processes” to attract more investment and support a more prosperous hospitality industry, not just in its cities but the wider region.
“By including hospitality, retail and leisure and all those other aspects, we are creating places where more people are prepared to live their lives in situ too – so they live and work somewhere and spend their money in those places,” he said.
“Since the lockdowns, some of the most vibrant communities around Birmingham are in the suburbs where there are some relatively prosperous people spending several days working from home and there’s been a burgeoning retail and hospitality offer in those places.”
He highlighted how Birmingham is thought to be the youngest major city in Europe, with under 25s accounting for nearly 40 per cent of its population, and the “very vibrant culture of young people who want to go out” one of the region’s major positives.
Parker acknowledged hospitality as an industry which is “often the first route [for young people] into work” and a “fantastic stepping stone for a career and teaches young people skills that will be useful to those young people in any environment”. Earlier this year, he launched a plan to tackle youth unemployment by creating 20,000 learning and work opportunities, which he said the sector could help support.
“It would be fantastic if the hospitality industry as a group could develop a proposition that will help us help those young people access the work and the jobs that can change their lives and hopefully support the industry, too,” he said.
He encouraged businesses already in, or those looking to invest in, the region, to talk to him about challenges they face. He added: “I want the [regional] growth plan to be relevant and resonate across the West Midlands and to do that, it’s critical that hospitality and tourism are built in as a foundational sector for our economy going forward.”
The West Midlands’ visitor economy has been strengthening year-on-year, with a record 145.4 million visitors in 2023 – four million more than the year before, which itself smashed figures from 2022 figures, when it played host to the Commonwealth Games. Visitor spend last year also increased to £16.3 billion, a 15 per cent increase year-on-year.
The region was named the second large European region of the future in 2024 by fDi Intelligence. Meanwhile, according to consulting firm EY, Birmingham was the UK’s most successful city for foreign direct investment in 2023 outside of London, attracting 67 inward investment projects in 2023. This was a 139 per cent increase on the year before, the city’s highest FDI figure for a decade, and more than twice the total of any other UK city outside of London during 2023.