Ryan Thomas

The city deal presents a unique opportunity to bring investment into the Swansea Bay region. It will take a massive amount of organisation - I hope that our local authorities will be able to deliver. If the project delivers good quality employment for locals and somehow finds a way to retain and reinvest financial and intellectual capital locally it will be a success. Anything else will simply be another piecemeal regeneration project will no real long-term benefit.

The city deal is a hugely complicated project that will require a lot of work by officials to make it a success. There are a long list of concerns, although who would expect any differently from such a multifaceted proposal. Truthfully, the levels of investment in the region are phenomenal and are potentially transformational. As the world transitions away from industry because of automation, the economy is moving towards being a knowledge or a smart economy. Success in the future will be about developing the next big idea, turning it into a useful product or service and marketing it as such. It is clear to me that this is exactly what the project team have in mind. I can see that the city deal proposal has also benefitted from the input of the private sector. The involvement of multinational firms such as Fujitsu and Cisco show that the proposals are built on strong foundations. If the city region can be made a success, it could trigger a new industrial revolution in out bit of South ...

As a good cynic, I will start by looking at some of the concerns I have with the city region deal as currently proposed. The deal will bring together a significant amount of public sector investment, but it will also involve massive amounts of private sector investment - £673m according to the proposals. This represents a huge amount of money and I'm not entirely sure how this will be delivered at the moment. Businesses will need to see something very special in the Swansea Bay region to make the kind of investments we are talking about. However, early indications suggest that there is a lot of private sector interest in some of the projects. In Carmarthenshire, officials have stated their surprise at the amount interest in the Life Sciences and Wellness Centre in Llanelli. However, showing an interest and investing hard cash represent very different levels of commitment. Already, we have seen that not all projects are going to plan. Yr Egin, which is at an advanced stage came into...

The growth in the city deal's four main sectors will be delivered through eleven initial projects; Digital Infrastructure  - Gigabit fibre, 4G, 5G and Wi-Fi - Total Project Value of £55m Swansea City and Waterfront Digital District  - incubation space and co-working areas for start-ups and small businesses, alongside global enterprise; a new City Centre Business District and a Digital Square and Arena - Total Project Value of £168.2m Creative Digital Cluster, Yr Egin, Carmarthen  - a digital and creative industry cluster joined by S4C as the key anchor tenant and approximately 28 other digital and creative media SMEs as tenants. Will also contain business accelerator facilities, incubation, as well as shared spaces for interaction between each of the tenants, driving entrepreneurial development - Total Project Value of £24.3m Centre of Excellence in Next Generation Services  - provide a data analytics capability to turn world class ...

Swansea Bay City Region Logo On Wednesday 25 January Carmarthenshire County Council agreed to delegate authority to the Leader of the Council to sign the Swansea Bay City Region deal based on a  'Heads of Terms' document presented to the meeting . The city region proposal presents what can only be described as a very exciting vision for the future of the region, which includes Carmarthen, Pembroke, Swansea and Neath Port Talbot counties. It's fair to say that a while ago the city deal was waning until it was picked up again by Cllr. Rob Stewart, Leader of Swansea City Council and Mark James, Chief Executive of Carmarthenshire County Council. At the moment, these two figures seem to be driving the project forward, supported by the other partner authorities. There is also a 'with Brexit, the city deal is the only game in town' attitude towards the proposal. The Swansea Bay City Deal focuses on four main sectors for both urban and rural areas across the region; digital...