Read the Forest Economic Partnership's latest blog by Mark Terry Lush
On Friday morning I was in Patch - the new workspace at the heart of Gloucester's £107m Forum development, and Patch's largest site anywhere - listening to two of our county's MPs - Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown and Alex McIntyre - talk about driving investment into Gloucestershire.
The conversation ranged across the Golden Valley, clean energy, defence spending and the new unitary authority that will replace our six councils from 2028. It was an optimistic morning - Gloucestershire has a great story to tell.
But when my turn came to ask a question, I made a different point. Almost everything said that morning about growth pointed at the corridor: Gloucester, Cheltenham, the M5. The Forest of Dean sits on the other side of the Severn.
In the Secretary of State's recent letter on local government reorganisation, the Forest was mentioned once and not in an economic context. If that's the level of visibility we carry into the biggest restructuring of local government in a generation, we have a problem.
The economy nobody sees
Here is the Forest economy in two numbers. Around 91 per cent of our businesses are micro, small and medium-sized enterprises. And wages here run roughly 11 per cent below the English average, while the proportion of residents with no formal qualifications is roughly half as high again as the national rate.
There is no anchor institution on our side of the river, no campus development with spades in the ground and ministers in hard hats. Our economy is thousands of small firms - engineers, makers, growers, builders, guest houses, attractions, service businesses - doing it largely for themselves.
That's a strength: it makes us resilient and rooted, it's also why we're easy to overlook. Nobody cuts a ribbon on a micro-business.
Tourism makes the point sharpest, and I'll declare the lens I see it through as chair of Visit Dean Wye. The visitor economy of the Forest of Dean and Wye Valley is worth in the region of £407 million a year and supports somewhere between six and seven thousand jobs. That is not a nice-to-have. It's one of our largest industries, and it gives many of our young people their first job.
Yet I've sat in forums where the working assumption is that tourism looks after itself. It doesn't. It has to be managed, invested in and represented - especially now, when hospitality businesses are absorbing taxation, utility and employment costs that would make far larger firms wince.
What the MPs said
To their credit, both MPs took the point head-on. Sir Geoffrey acknowledged that for as long as he has been in Parliament, investment has flowed into Gloucester and Cheltenham while places like the Forest have been left behind - his words, not mine - and that this isn't fair on the young people growing up here.
He also made an argument I'd like to hear more often: that our landscape, the county's green lungs, is itself an inward-investment asset. Businesses choose to come here partly because of what the Forest is.
Alex McIntyre MP called the Forest a jewel in the crown, pointed to ongoing lobbying for a fairer share of county funding and for a new crossing over the Severn, and welcomed signals from the incoming national leadership that hospitality's pressures are finally being recognised.
Warm words matter, but they were attached to something more useful: agreement on procurement. The new unitary authority will hold enormous purchasing power. Both MPs backed weighting contracts towards social value and opening them up to local SMEs, citing meet-the-buyer events that have already turned county contracts into work for small Gloucestershire firms.
In an economy that is 91 per cent SMEs, no district has more to gain from getting this right than the Forest and no district has more to lose if the new authority defaults to big contractors from elsewhere.
The opportunity in the upheaval
It would be easy to treat reorganisation purely as a threat, which I don't. A single Gloucestershire authority, done well, could spread prosperity more deliberately than six councils competing for scraps ever could.
The panel's shared commitment - making youth opportunities the county's moral mission - lands hardest here, where the pattern for too long has been that we educate our young people and then watch them leave. Better-paid, year-round jobs in tourism, hospitality and our wider SME economy are how we change that.
But opportunity is not distribution. Nothing about the new structure guarantees the Forest a fair share of investment, procurement or attention. That has to be argued for, evidenced and won - continuously, by people in the room.
And there is now a national promise to hold onto. In his first major speech as incoming Labour leader, Andy Burnham pledged "good growth in every postcode". We welcome that ambition and we will take it at face value - which means the Forest of Dean is where it must be delivered. GL14 to GL18 are postcodes too.
That is what the Forest Economic Partnership is for. We are a not-for-profit voice for the businesses of the Forest of Dean, working alongside partners including Visit Dean Wye, and over the next two years our job is to make sure this district is represented inside the new arrangements, not waiting outside them.
If you run a business in the Forest, this is the moment to add your voice to ours. Get in touch, get involved and help us make sure that when Gloucestershire's future is decided, the Forest is at the table.
Mark Terry-Lush is a director of the Forest Economic Partnership and chair of Visit Dean Wye, the destination management organisation for the Forest of Dean and Wye Valley.