Brighton and Hove is well placed to become one of the top performing cities as the British economy recovers, a new report says.
The Centre for Cities, a think-tank supported by the Local Government Association, has published Cities Outlook 2010, which ranks the economic performance of cities across the country.
And Brighton has scored highly in many key areas, including growth in private sector jobs and its highly skilled workforce.
The study found that Brighton had a high percentage of knowledge-intensive jobs and residents with high-level skills.
It said: “It is notable that there is a correlation between cities’ performance on high skills, and their concentration of knowledge-intensive businesses.
“Cambridge, Edinburgh, Reading, London and Brighton are high-performers in both indices, reinforced by the presence of top universities, indicating that their economies are particularly well placed to attract jobs and growth.”
From 1998 to 2008 Brighton and Hove saw a bigger percentage growth in private sector jobs than any other city, a staggering 70 per cent, or 20,800 jobs.
It said: “As the economy recovers, cities need to focus on growing and attracting more private sector jobs. But this won’t happen everywhere – different sectoral structures, different economic histories and different geographies mean that some cities are more likely to generate private sector jobs than others.
“For some cities, like Leeds and Manchester, their size makes them important economic centres. In others like Reading and Brighton, their location and economic base makes them well-placed to attract jobs and growth.”
Brighton and Hove also scored highly on earnings growth and the number of people with high-level qualifications.
This is the second recent report to predict Brighton and Hove will emerge well from the economic recovery.
In May HSBC’s Future of Business report said that Brighton was likely to become one of five British “supercities” due to the entrepreneurial nature of its media businesspeople.
It said: “Brighton is becoming the deregulation capital of the UK.
“Here, 82 per cent of entrepreneurs, many based in the so-called MDMA industries (marketing, design, media and advertising), believe that regulations and work-related legislation is a threat to their new entrepreneurial abilities.”
It said that an “open-source” approach to innovation is turning creative towns such as Brighton into “alternative economic and innovation powerhouses”.
