The Swansea Bay City Deal: The Projects

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 data into commercial systems and solutions - Total Project Value of £55.5m
  • Skills and Talent initiative - ensuring that local people and businesses have the appropriate skills to benefit from each of the City Deal themes
  • Homes as Power Stations - To create a new industry based around innovative and sustainable energy generation, combined with storage and efficiency. New technologies developed will be applied within the region, allowing homes and buildings to generate, store, and release their own energy. The project will also address fuel poverty, which remains a persistent challenge for many communities across the region - Total Project Value of £517.1m
  • Pembroke Dock Marine - The project will involve the development of a marine energy test area utilising the deep port of Milford Haven, an energy engineering centre of excellence, and a wave energy demonstration zone - Total Project Value of £76.3m.
  • The Llanelli Life Science & Wellbeing Village - Aims to deliver transformational social and economic benefits through delivering the full scope of the Life Science and Wellbeing Village definition, namely the integration of business development, education, wellness initiatives, research and development and healthcare initiatives - Total Project Value of £199.5m
  • Life science & Wellbeing campus network - will build upon the successful Institute of Life Science initiative, providing a world-class integrated research & business incubator/park secondary/tertiary clinical, research and trials environment, and skills development centres - Total Project Value of £45m
Illustrative flyover of the proposed Llanelli Life Science & Wellbeing Village:

  • Factory of the Future - It will support SMEs to invest in leading edge technologies and harness the opportunities associated with the digital manufacturing revolution - Total Project Value - £23.5m
  • Steel Science - The Centre will address the current and future challenges of sustaining primary steel-making capacity in the region and the UK, building upon the region’s centres of excellence and industrial capabilities. - Total Project Value of £80m.
I have listed these projects very briefly and more information can be found in the report submitted to the county council (available here). These projects should lead to a total investment of £1.3billion in the region over 15 years. This will consist of £241m split between the UK and Welsh Governments. Some £360m of other public sector funding and £673m of private sector contributions will make up the total investment package. The city region team believe that this investment will deliver up to 9,465 new jobs for the region, contributing to an uplift in Gross Value Added (GVA) of £1.8bn, calculated using the same methods as those in the Treasury Green Book. This should contrast with the previous two decades of jobless growth in the region. 

This is Part 2 in a series of posts about the proposed Swansea Bay City Region Deal. Part 3 will consider the concerns surrounding the proposals.

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