Team Talk: Christian Spence

Christian Spence, Research Manager at Greater Manchester Chamber of Commerce

Christian Spence, Head of Business Intelligence, talks about his role at the Chamber.

Head of Business Intelligence could be seen as a somewhat esoteric title but, essentially, my role covers three main areas within the Chamber of Commerce.

Sitting within the Chamber’s policy team who work on our advocacy, campaign and representation work on behalf of the membership, first I lead the Chamber’s research programme allowing us to understand and interpret the wider business climate in Greater Manchester and how policy, coming from local and national government, political parties, think-tanks and other bodies may affect the way our business community and the wider population interact, develop and grow in our area and beyond.

Second, I directly support our Chief Economist, Dr John Ashcroft, on macro-economic (UK and international) research and analysis whilst I look after research, analysis and intelligence at the local Greater Manchester level on employment and the labour market, sectoral trends within Greater Manchester and local economic development strategies.

Third, I lead on internal and external data management, looking after not only our ever-growing database of local, regional, national and international economic data from external sources as well as our own internal research, but also our own internal systems and processes with our new CRM system at its heart.

One of my favourite things about working in this role at the Chamber is that no two days are ever alike. Though most days start in a similar way, checking the morning’s news and parliamentary schedules, after that it could be anything. For example, this morning saw the release of some datasets from the Office for National Statistics that we track closely for our monthly economics updates for members alongside our own economic modelling. When that’s arrived, the large spreadsheets are pored over for important trends and the ubiquitous revisions to past data, and that’s usually followed by hasty tweeting and the writing of a press release.

Today I’m heading to Stockport town centre to do an interview for BBC Sunday Politics about the impact of business rates on our members, as well as how the current changes to the system may affect local authorities in the future. The Chamber gets a lot of requests from a variety of media for comments on a huge array of topics, everything from the economic impact of the weather on business through to tourism, sport, major political and economic announcements and pretty much everything in between. This is part of the job I really enjoy: a couple of minutes being quizzed on a subject with little advance notice of questions is exciting, and certainly keeps you on your toes!

This week is one of the twelve weeks each year that the Chamber’s Quarterly Economic Survey (QES) is live. The QES is the single largest piece of research I manage at the Chamber with around 3,000 individual responses each year. The questions in the survey are really simple but it’s hard to overplay just how good the survey is for us at understanding our economy: it really is a huge part of our economic research and the evidence from it is used in almost every part of our campaigning work both locally and with national government. If you haven’t yet filled it in, then please do!

One of my biggest challenges over the next few months is getting from behind my desk to meet with more you, our members, more often. Surveys and ONS data tell us a lot about what’s going on in the businesses in Greater Manchester, but nothing beats a half-hour chat with a member to give me a genuine understanding of some of the challenges and opportunities you respond to each and every day. With over 4,000 members with 300,000 employees, I’m never going to meet you all but, if you see me at events or fancy having a chat about the work I do, do stop me or drop me a line. I may even end up visiting your business soon to learn more about what you do. After all, it’s you who build the economy: we’re here merely to help you perform at your best.