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The University of Liverpool has been assisting in Liverpool’s 15 year plan to enable the city to compete at an international level. The plan, named Liverpool 2024 sets out plans to :
 

• Create thousands of jobs and reduce unemployment
• Increase the city population by building more family homes.
• Make Liverpool one of the cleanest, greenest and safest cities in the country.
• Improve the health of every resident by reducing levels of obesity and the number of smokers.

The University of Liverpool’s input into the strategy has been in areas such as the development and expansion of the city’s knowledge sector - an area in which 25% of the workforce are graduates. The university has also been involved in helping the city council establish an international group to assist the city in its international positioning.

Guild President Danielle Grufferty said of the plans “It is very encouraging to see that Liverpool is striving towards being a truly international city. For the city, it would mean retaining more graduates from the Universities and thus stem the brain drain, whilst bringing increased diversity to Merseyside.”

The need for these proposals comes as the city region still lags behind the UK as a whole, with employment rates more than 10% lower than the national average (presently 63.5% in  Liverpool compared to 74.5% nationally). The plan also aims to increase the city’s wealth to greater than the national average from the present 92%.

 Dr Paul Redmond, the University’s Head of Careers and Employability has stressed the importance of these proposals to both university students and the local population.
“Liverpool has long been recognised as one of the most popular cities in the country for students to go to university. In recent years, the city has boasted around 50,000 full and part-time students, giving the sub-region one of the highest student densities in the UK.

 On graduation, surveys show that many of these graduates would ideally like to remain in Merseyside, working and, in many cases, continuing with their studies.

 The problem has been the availability of ‘graduate-level’ jobs. Merseyside’s local employer-base is dominated by small and medium-sized organisations and the public sector. While both of these recruit significant numbers of graduates, we have long recognised that more could be done in the regional economy to increase graduate retention.

 The announcement of this 15-year plan offers an excellent opportunity to tackle some of these issues through the creation of more graduate-level job opportunities and through the enhancement of the sub-regional economy.

 Merseyside is a fantastic place for students to study, work and live; the challenge now for all of us is to build on this” he said.

Andrew Shearwood