Chief says it is too easy to criticise councils attending Cannes conference
One of the most senior council leaders in the West Midlands has said it is too easy to criticise local authorities for sending delegates to a global real estate conference on the French Riviera.
A number of local authorities in the region have come under intense criticism for attending the Mipim property conference in Cannes.
But Councillor Shaun Davies, leader of Telford & Wrekin Council, and chairman of the Local Government Association, said staying away could potentially mean missing out on millions of pounds of foreign investment.
"I have never been to Mipim myself, but staff from the council have attended," he said.
"We have secured massive investment on the back of it.
"It is very easy to grab the headlines about council staff going to Mipim, but we live in an global interconnected world, and we need people to invest in our areas."
Councillor Davies, who is to be Labour's candidate for Telford at the next General Election, spoke to the Star at a lunch meeting with business leaders in the Black Country.
He was guest speaker at the event hosted by the Richardson group in Oldbury.
He said his own council had also attended a real estate conference in Leeds, but such events just did not have the worldwide reach of the Mipim conference in Cannes.
The Mipim real estate conference – Le Marché International des Professionnels de d'Immobilier, translated as the international market for real estate professionals – is billed as the world's biggest property conference, and is held in Cannes each March.
In recent years, Wolverhampton, Staffordshire, Dudley, Sandwell, Telford & Wrekin and Shropshire councils have all been represented at the event.
But Dudley's attendance in 2022 sparked a bitter backlash after it emerged that the authority had spent £300,000 to attend the event over three years.
Two of these events were cancelled during the coronavirus lockdown, and the authority is now seeking to recover the money it spent with an external company, which organised the trip.
An independent auditor’s report, commissioned by the Conservative-run council, highlighted a series of governance failings, and council officers could now face disciplinary action.
Councillor Cat Eccles, of the opposition Labour group, said attendance was a waste of money.
“Of course, I appreciate the need to attract investment in our borough, but right now our basic council services are struggling, and we desperately need to build more social homes," she said.
"All the big projects under way currently are purely vanity projects for the Tory party, they don’t help the average resident with the struggles they are currently facing.”
