Tomorrow morning (11 September) sees a first for OxLEP as – with the support of our MPs and some of the county’s most-innovative companies – we will be holding the first of a year-long series of exclusive House of Commons breakfast briefings.
At these quarterly events, we will be demonstrating the significant breadth of global economic opportunities within the county. This, at a time when Oxfordshire’s Local Industrial Strategy is being developed with the aim of positioning the county as one of the top-three global innovation ecosystems – building on the region’s world-leading science and technology clusters – and to pioneer emerging transformative technologies and sectors, as part of the wider ‘Oxford-Cambridge Corridor’.
At the House of Commons briefing, we will be showcasing to a specially-selected audience how four transformative technologies; connected and autonomous vehicles, space-led data applications, digital health and technologies underpinning quantum computing – all recognised in Oxfordshire’s Science and Innovation Audit – could be worth in the region of £180billion to the UK by 2030, around six per cent of the global economy in these technologies.
Hosted by North Oxfordshire MP Victoria Prentis, our first Westminster briefing will focus on connected and autonomous vehicles. Paul Newman – Founder of Oxbotica and Principal Investigator at the University of Oxford's Oxford Robotics Institute – will deliver a key-note speech.
The next decade will undoubtedly present Oxfordshire with major opportunities – many on a global scale – and the message we will be taking to Westminster is that they are opportunities that we are ready to capitalise on.
At the briefing, we will be posing the question, why Oxfordshire? We are very much open for business. With £23bn GVA per annum, we are one of only three net contributors to the Exchequer.
Why is this?
We have answered the call from central government and – working in partnership with the Oxfordshire Growth Board – the hugely-significant £215million Oxfordshire Growth Deal, announced by the Chancellor of the Exchequer last November, can support a boost in productivity, investment in infrastructure and will allow Oxfordshire to utilise the world-class science and innovation assets, as well as making full use of our two government-backed enterprise zones.
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