Unsworth Sugden Group

This morning’s Leicester Mercury features more post-Budget coverage for another of our local PR clients.

After Westleigh Developments appeared in last Thursday’s paper, today is the turn of fellow property developer Raynsway Properties as managing director Tom Watkinson gives a cautious welcome to plans to overhaul the planning system and further reaction to the removal of red tape for businesses and Leicestershire not being named as one of the 10 selected enterprise zones across the UK.

For those of you with a copy of today’s paper you can read the article on page 10 of the business supplement, otherwise you can read a PDF of the article here.

Tom Watkinson, MD of Raynsway Properties, gives his reaction to the Budget in today's Leicester Mercury

One of the Chancellor’s announcements yesterday during the 2011 Budget was a new £250 million shared equity scheme, called First Buy, aimed at helping around 10,000 first time buyers to get onto the property ladder and purchase a new build home.

When the Leicester Mercury came looking for an immediate response to this particular part of George Osborne’s speech, we were able to supply a comment from client Westleigh Developments.

As part of his quote on Home Buy, Ian Jones,  Business Development Director at the regional property developer, urged caution saying “the devil will be in the detail and it will be interesting to see how these changes are implemented in the coming weeks.”

You can read the full article on page 9 of today’s Mercury or HERE if you haven’t a copy. This forms part of the paper’s comprehensive post-Budget coverage.

Will George help the commercial property market in tomorrow's Budget or won't he?

EDIT: Afternoon of Wednesday 23rd March - Reaction to the Budget:

In response to the question posed in the title of this blog - not an awful lot! At least not at first glance. There are a number of reforms earmarked for the planning regime which sound interesting, which on paper could make life for developers a little easier. But as with all these things, whilst they sound very nice, how long will it take these new rules to kick in? Hopefully not “a number of years”, which the Chancellor seemed to say about a number of his proposals today.

Keep watching for the blog for more ‘post-Budget’ comments from our clients.

Last week the new coalition government announced its Emergency Budget and when the Leicester Mercury revealed it was looking for comments and reaction from the local business community, the PR team leapt into action.

After a few quick phonecalls we were able to set up a telephone interview between the newspaper and the managing director of client Westleigh Developments, Chris Beighton.

This resulted in a small opinion piece in the following morning’s paper, but as the interview went so well Chris was interviewed again later that week for a much larger article. After liaising with the paper we were delighted to read Chris’ Business Interview, which appeared in this Tuesday’s Business supplement.

 It just goes to show how a quick reaction can achieve some brilliant PR coverage.