In April 2019 the towns of Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole (BCP) will be combined under one new unitary authority, ‘Urban Dorset’, bringing with it both opportunities and challenges for the region’s business community.

BCP has high employment, with the 10th highest number of businesses per person of all UK cities, and the fourth highest concentration of digital and creative industries in the UK outside of London, according to Tech Nations.

On top of this, it has a large and growing health and social care sector, accounting for 15 per cent of local employment, providing services to the area’s large elderly population; BCP has the highest proportion of over 65s of any UK town or city.

BCP has the opportunity to build on these existing employment strengths as well as the growing infrastructure and tech scene. In particular, these two factors – a thriving tech community and a large healthcare sector – combine to make BCP a great location to develop and test innovative healthcare solutions.

There are already some health innovation businesses in the area. These include companies such as Nourish, a provider of digital tools to enable teams to co-ordinate care records on the go, and Curamicus, which is developing assistive technology to prevent and detect falls by elderly people carers. There is real potential for Urban Dorset to support the growth of these start-ups and the launch of more, to become the hotbed of cutting-edge healthcare innovation in the UK.   

Already new co-working spaces are opening up to support this success – THIS Group, for example, has opened a 24/7 creative hub. Investing in providing more of the right office space for similar companies, as Bristol has already successfully proved, could help build this into a unique selling point for the area, particularly given the strengths of Bournemouth University in the health and social sciences sectors.

There are several areas across the new unitary authority suitable for such growth but the innovation village at Talbot Village, adjacent to two universities, is one of the obvious locations to accommodate new business space of the type needed. It’s also well placed to capture the talent generated at the universities and retain graduates.

BCP needs to work with the universities and Local Enterprise Partnership to provide incubator space and to encourage and support spin-off start-up companies to develop this sector to its full potential. Improved connectivity could unlock huge potential across the region and with the Lansdowne area of Bournemouth being the first 5G test bed in the UK, alongside the areas superfast broadband, it offers a unique proposition to future companies. Rolling out 5G to Talbot Village would be the next step in attracting clusters of tech and creative companies to the area.

Because the universities are close to the Bournemouth and Poole border, Urban Dorset will be able disregard the previous local authority boundaries and open up sites for further development that weren’t previously available. If all the new opportunities created are seized upon, Urban Dorset should be the start of a new chapter in BCP’s future.

Further information

Read more: Spotlight: The New Urban Dorset