Happy New Year to all readers. I hope Santa brought some lovely surprises and you all had an opportunity to rest and relax.

The new year is upon us and much is happening. The recent award of £20m in levelling up funding to Gloucester is primarily being used to support city centre regeneration, with £4m going to support the building of the Forum – the current building of the new retail outlet and housing behind Market Parade will enable the decant and demolition of Grosvenor House and the start of the Forum buildings.

£10m is going to the University to commence their buildout of the City Centre campus (in the former Debenhams building), eventually to be the study location for some 4,500 students. In between, much of Kings Square has been completed, with the remaining works to be finished in the Spring. This will be a huge event space for cultural offerings, overlooked as it is by the Musicworks and Jolt, run by the Gloucester Culture Trust.

Along Westgate Street, the Fleece Hotel was the beneficiary of £6m of levelling up funding and it is hoped that work can soon start to bring these buildings back into functional use. The regeneration throughout this area and the re-population with thousands of students, plus workers in the Forum, will be a catalyst for further investment in the surrounding areas, bringing yet more life and more jobs into the city centre.

A high volume of job vacancies

On the subject of jobs, the October figures for jobs in Gloucester showed there were nearly 12,000 unique vacancies, many in personal care and retail, but thousands in lots of other sectors. There were 3,545 out of work claiming Job Seeker’s Allowance or Universal Credit, which was a reduction of 2.6% on the previous month.

Of course, there may be skills gaps that prevent many unemployed taking available jobs, but so many vacancies should be an encouragement for anyone unemployed that there are opportunities to get back into the workforce and every incentive to keep trying. From an employee perspective, the number of vacancies is causing some wage inflation in some sectors – it was very obvious in the HGV driver sector – meaning better conditions for employees.

So, with lots of positivity and opportunity, we can look forward with confidence to 2022.