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University Campus for Dudley

• Posted by Steven Nash on March 30th, 2008 filed in Uncategorized

After reading the comments of Dudley Councillor Liz Walker in the Dudley News, I felt disappointed and surprised that she could not see the obvious potential benefits that a University campus could bring to the town. So I wrote the following letter which has now been published.

I was disappointed to read Councillor Liz Walker’s comments (page 11, 12/3/2008) that she does not believe that a University campus could aid the long term regeneration of Dudley.She is right to ask: “What could we provide in a small campus in Dudley that we could not provide in Birmingham or Wolverhampton?” However the manner in which she asks this question has the air of defeat and negativity, an attitude that will leave this town in the same state that it has been since the early 1990’s.Dudley needs to invest in skills if it is to provide employment and services in the modern world. Part of that investment is a University campus that can focus on skills. 20 campuses have been proposed, to built around the country, so why do we have an elected representative uninterested in taking this opportunity for the town?

A University campus could bring benefits such as research programmes. Why can’t we work in partnership with Universities based in Birmingham, Staffordshire or Wolverhampton on specialist IT-related research projects? I would encourage Councillor Walker to talk to Lecturers and find the niche areas of research that we could offer; for example one area of interest to me is web accessibility so I would be interested in a Dudley campus that worked with the Beacon Centre for the Blind to study how people with visual impairments use the web and what we can do to improve this experience for them.From an economic point of view, users with severe disabilities represents a market in the USA worth around $46 billion a year, so it would be research which would almost certainly attract investment from both public bodies and private companies.

The potential research projects are out there but it requires the Council to spend the time to identify them.

Councillor Walker’s comments appear to be encouraging young people to leave the area, instead of building the facilities to encourage other young people from other areas to come to Dudley.

I went to a University campus based in Stafford which has a modern technology park based next to it. The rapid growth of the business park since 2000 is very encouraging. There are now many established businesses based there, and 38 graduate start-up businesses have been started since 2006 using a scheme provided by the University which offers the following:

• An £8000 grant
• Free business premises, computers, and software.
• A mentor guiding these young entrepreneurs.

Every successful start-up encourages more businesses to locate there, all eager to be based in a town with a constant supply of graduates equipped with the skills they need.

As a Staffordshire University graduate, I am eligible for this scheme, so if I wanted to start a company; why would I want to base it in Dudley and therefore (as Counciller Walker puts it) - ‘come back and share the wealth’?

This scheme or something similar could be used in Dudley; a University campus and space allocated within the forthcoming Innovation Centre at Castle Gate to encourage technology related start-ups.

I urge Councillor Walker to ask her question again, but this time to think creatively, to be positive, and to find out just which areas we can exploit that are not being covered by other campuses. I want our representatives to have a positive long term vision of what Dudley can be, to attract investment and to exploit its potential - not to surrender to its current situation.