Growing pains

SOUTH-east England can achieve economic growth rates of nearly ten per cent a year and become one of the world's ten most successful regions within a decade, the chairman designate of its Regional Development Agency has predicted.

Allan Willett warned, however, that there must be no further damage to the environment. "We want to keep our green and pleasant land. Only 13 per cent is built up and we don't want to change that. That is what will attract people and if we cover it with car parks and roads they won't want to live here," he said.

The south-east must be Britain's innovation region, he said in an interview with the FT, attracting the clean, high-technology industries and leaping up the chain of high value-added business. It also had to improve its second-class rail network. He said the south-east should look not just to successful European regions such as Hamburg, Paris and Munich, but to US regions such as west Connecticut, which bears the same relationship to New York that south-east England has to London.

Mr Willett, chairman of Willett International, a manufacturer and supplier of coding and labelling equipment, is one of eight chairmen chosen to head English development

agencies, which begin operations next April.

He has handed over the role of chief executive of the family business to his son Robert in order to concentrate on the part-time job.

Unlike parts of northern England and the Midlands, the south-east has little regional consciousness. Mr Willett is used to building organisations from scratch, having founded

the Centre for Tomorrow's Company in 1996, following a Royal Society of Arts inquiry as well as his own business.

The headquarters of the South-east Economic Development Agency, which will have up to 100 staff, will be Guildford. That makes the Surrey town the region's administrative

capital: it already houses the Government office, and the recently formed investment agency is likely to move there. The region encompasses Oxfordshire, Buckinghamshire, Berkshire, Hampshire, the Isle of Wight, Surrey, East and West Sussex and Kent.

"We have got to work closely with London, which is like sharing a tent with an elephant," Mr Willett said.

He added: "The south-east is a £100bn economy of eight million people. If we were an independent country we would be the world's 19th largest economy, and the tenth largest in Europe.

"Although it is the wealthiest UK region outside London, it slipped from 15th to 18th among European regions in 1995 in gross domestic product per head."

Mr Willett wants to bring poorer parts of the region such as Thames Gateway, Thanet, Hastings and other coastal areas up to the south-east average.

He believes long-term growth rates approaching double digits can be achieved despite the current slowdown, which he sees as necessary. "I don't disagree with the Bank of England's monetary committee. Even though my company exports 90 per cent of its UK output and you can imagine what that's doing to us - I'd rather have that than inflation," he said.

Unlike some chairmen further north, he believes the RDA's powers. High on his agenda is the possibility of setting up regional funds for venture capital of buy-outs, or a regional

bond for infrastructure and development.

Mr Willett wants to build relationships with other public and private bodies and welcomes the indirect chamber being created to advise the RDA. He expressed no view on whether it

should eventually become an elected assembly. If that is what the people of the south-east want in the next ten years, then it will happen by evolution, he said.

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