Councillor Mark Shayer (Deputy Leader and Cabinet Member for Finance and Economy) introduced the report and highlighted –

a)    Plymouth and South Devon Freeport was a flagship and highly ambitious programme to create thousands of high quality jobs and to play a crucial part in post-COVID19 pandemic recovery;

b)    The Freeport model used simplified tax and custom benefits aimed at attracting new and expanding businesses as well as attracting foreign investment;

c)    The Government was providing £25 million of seed capital that needed to be locally matched to unlock site infrastructure;

d)    The Freeport would supercharge the South West Economy by building on the regions unique national capabilities in Marine, Defence and Space;

e)    It was a unique opportunity to level-up, address historical challenges and leverage exciting opportunities to transform the economy of Plymouth and South Devon, through three key objectives:

                      i.        Creating a national hub for trade and investment;

                     ii.        Promoting regeneration and job creation;

                    iii.        Creating a hotbed for innovation.

f)     The Plymouth and South Devon Freeport would;

                          i.        Enable new employment land to be bought forward at the three sites of South Yard, Langage and Sherford;

                         ii.        Support a new £30m Innovation Centre at Oceansgate;

                        iii.        Provide a major expansion plan for Princess Yachts;

                        iv.        Include £29m investment from Local Authorities;

                         v.        Leverage £250m private sector investment;

                        vi.        Deliver over 3,500 jobs.

g)    Officers had last updated the Committee in February 2022;

h)    The Plymouth and South Devon Freeport was in the first 3 Freeport’s out of the 8 to reach the milestone of submission and approval of the full business case;

i)     The focus was now on mobilising the organisations, its resources and initiatives;

j)     Thanked the public and private sector partners for their hard work and expressed delight with the progress that had been made to deliver regeneration and high quality jobs to the city region.

In response to questions it was explained by Councillor Mark Shayer, Caroline Cozens (Head of Strategic Programmes, Economic Development), David Draffan (Service Director, Economic Development) and Richard May (Interim CEO, Plymouth and South Devon Freeport) –

k)    As the full occupation of the site is not yet know, only Strategic Transport Assessments have been undertaken to date in partnership between Devon County Council, National Highways as well as Plymouth City Council and detailed assessments would come forward  with individual planning applications;

l)     The innovation plans had originated 8 years ago and there would be a mobility hub on site with multi-storey parking, with priority for car-sharing and cycling, to ensure there was not conflict within the residential areas close to the site;

m)  A planning application for a development at Princess Yachts had been previously submitted and when a further application was submitted, a pre-application enquiry would be undertaken to look at the issues on that site;

n)    Most of the land that is being brought back into beneficial use was at Langage and Sherford;

o)    More would be done to publicise what a Freeport was to members of the public to help them understand, which would be easier once the first ‘deal’ was confirmed;

p)    Although a significant amount of work had been done on the Investment Zone Expression of Interest, it had only been over a 2 week period and had been taken from a rolling list of existing projects, which allowed the team to present existing projects for funding opportunities and the team were awaiting more information on how the new government would possibly use the applications for different initiatives;

q)    A freight strategy was emerging for the city region, but was hard to pin point this as without knowing which companies would be there, it was hard to determine how much freight movement there would be;

r)     Plymouth City Council was playing an active role in Peninsula Transport, which was the sub-national transport body for the South West and would be looking at the Freight Strategy Analysis of the South West;

s)     There was a Gateway Policy in place for the Freeport, which meant that there could not be any displacement from other UK areas, it could only be for significant expansion or new businesses;

t)     The number of newly created jobs was hard to measure without knowing who would being the Freeport, but it would be compared to the business case scenario in the future, which had been through independent treasury and consultant and cross-party assessments;

u)    The business case scenario had been optimistic of growth from both existing businesses as well as new and innovative business start-ups;

v)    The Freeport was wanted by The Royal Navy, Babcock and Princess Yachts to make investments that they wouldn’t otherwise make;

w)   The Freeport Company Ltd was owned by the three local authorities and had a members agreement that set out the scheme of delegation and a series of reserved matters and the company would be required to carry out joint scrutiny on an annual basis and produce an annual report with performance measures from the business case;

x)     There was a performance framework for all 8 Freeports;

y)    Customs was not the main driver of the Freeport;

z)    Some custom sites were within the Freeport, but other sites could be brought on within a 45 kilometre radius of the Freeport, subject to eligibility;

aa)  Some of the customs regulations that were available to use in a Freeport were available to anybody in the UK outside of Freeport; the incentive of having a custom zone within Freeport was that there were additional buildings ad capital allowances associated with them which made them more advantageous;

bb) Customs was not the main driver of the Freeport, it was a future opportunity;

cc)  The Freeport aimed to bring strong pipeline of innovation and opportunities to invest.

The Committee agreed to –

1)    Note the report;

2)    Recommend that a future Committee receive a progress report in 6 months’, detailing freight and infrastructure strategy.