If you were asked to name a UK city with just 3.5% unemployment, the country’s fastest growing jobs market, a multi-billion pound investment boom and levels of new business creation that outstrip the national average, which would it be? Leeds, probably, or Edinburgh. Maybe Manchester. In fact, take a bow Liverpool, the Mersey port approaching its 800th birthday in rude health. Five years ago, the city’s business community wondered when the gloom would end; now they dismiss it as a 30-year statistical blip common in port cities reliant on global trade. Confidence has returned.
The headline figures make impressive reading. The Duke of Westminster has committed £800m to a major overhaul of the city’s retail offer, creating 8,000 jobs. Then there is Land Rover’s new 1,000-job production line for the revamped Freelander model. And there is the inexorable rise of Liverpool John Lennon Airport, with 3,000 new jobs in tow and a couple of thousand more to come as the current expansion delivers the goods.
