Adrian said “I am so pleased to receive this honour. Business and Industry have been important tenets in my life, through which I have sought positive, sustainable outcomes for my colleagues and my community. This award is a humbling recognition of a lifetime of effort in building a successful business — and working to support others in building theirs, through my role as Managing Director of Welding World and Chairman of biz4Biz”.

Adrian attended school and college in Stevenage and married Jennie in 1977. Together they have two children: The eldest, Gareth, is married to Shelley; and Alexis, who is married to Tristan Bond. The families continue to live locally and, during 2020, gave birth to grandsons, Elliott and Greyson.

Adrian’s career in industry began in 1975 with the British Oxygen Company (BOC) and he founded Weldability Sif in 1981, which he grew from supplying one branded product in the UK, to many thousands internationally today. The company became a highly successful and respected source for a full range of welding products, trading as Weldability, and in 2008 acquired Sif – a British welding consumables company started in 1925. In March 2019 Weldability-Sif was acquired by Indutrade AB, a NASDAQ-listed corporation.

In recent years Adrian has been a school and college Governor and Chairman of a multi-academy trust. In his tenure, Adrian established the Weldability-Sif Foundation, a charity that today supports more than 40 Welder-Training Studios across the UK, which have so far delivered 18,000 welder qualifications. The foundation works alongside awarding-bodies, incorporates the services of FE colleges and partners with businesses such as MakeUK and EDF, to address industrial skills pipelining for the UK workforce.

Adrian is also the Chairman and Founder of biz4Biz, an organisation established to support business owners and leaders, as well as a patron of business clubs, working alongside Hertfordshire MPs and Local Authorities and engaging with local business leaders.

From 2014 to 2020 Adrian was appointed to the main board of the Hertfordshire LEP, serving his full six-year term and he has served as Deputy Chair of the Hertfordshire LEP from 2017 to 2020. Adrian continues to Chair the Hertfordshire LEP’s Skills and Employment Board (SAP), has championed the delivery of the Hertfordshire Opportunities Portal (HOP) and, in collaboration with the University of Hertfordshire, delivered a voluntary supporter’s network to provide a support service to businesses during the COVID pandemic.

In March 2020, Adrian was appointed the independent Chairman of the Stevenage Development Board. A lifelong advocate for Stevenage — having been born in his parents’ council house and subsequently started his first business in the New Town — Adrian is leading the Board on a £50M funding bid from the Government’s Towns Fund. If successful, the bid is expected to release a further £600M in private funding for the regeneration of Stevenage, the UK’s first new town.

The Hitchin and Harpenden MP proposes an equity fund of £15 billion to help SME business recovery, which is currently being considered by Government who understand that they will need to be more radical in order to heal the economy.

Bim said, “there are things that we need to do in the relatively short term to really kick start the economy like allowing investors to use part of ISA funds to put into private companies. This idea of recapitalising private companies by way of the recovery fund – around £15 billion of private and public money – will assist SMEs with their debt, which at the moment is higher as a percentage of its revenue and in absolute terms than it has been since records began.

“What we need is a fund that can take some of that debt and turn it into equity, if you can get more equity into those businesses it will be easier for them to manage their debt pile, at the same time providing an opportunity for the Government to take some of the upside when these companies become successful. This means that the Government would benefit a small amount from putting in rescue capital.”

In addition to this, Bim discussed his wider ideas for Hertfordshire, including an overhaul of the local infrastructure, some of which he believes can be completed quickly. New roads, for example, can be accelerated with the introduction of road pricing, which will attract funding from private investors with the planning then handled by Local Government. This aims to improve connections for the county as moving from place to place, from Hertfordshire to Essex for example, or even within Hertfordshire, often takes much longer than it should due to the poor infrastructure within the county.

Bim Afolami talking to a lively audience on Zoom

Bim said, “I think we should be moving to road pricing, constructing roads, and instructing people to pay a toll to take that road. I think that to get a lot more private investment into road infrastructure, which will be facilitated by road pricing, you need planning reform which is something the government really has been very radical about.

“Fundamentally, we need to give local areas the ability and the incentive to construct necessary infrastructure themselves. I think people are worried about introducing new toll roads, but strategically, when building roads that are at least dual carriageways it’s easier to get private investment if there’s a much quicker and direct payoff to the owner of the road, versus traditional government road with the complicated private investor route. Of course, in the wake of COVID-19, having people in their cars is better than people on buses so more roads is what the UK needs and what the economy needs”

Also discussed were the wider ramifications of working from home over the lockdown period. As offices shut down temporarily across the country and allowed their workers to continue from the safety of their own homes to help prevent the spread of COVID-19, there has been some discussion as to whether this will lead to a general shift in the number of people continuing to work in commercial spaces.

At first glance, particularly to the businesses themselves, there seems little downside in dosing or reducing the size of their offices, therefore reducing overheads, commute time, environmental impact etc ‘I he effects of this could, however, extend even further than the devastating loss of business for commercial landlords, lunch places, dry cleaners, and public transport.

Bim shared an interesting story with the Connexions group foretelling the outsourcing of white-collar jobs:

“A guy who runs a big private equity house said to me ‘Bim’, when I failed to reach accountants and lawyers who work for me from home, I worked out that I could just ring somebody from the Netherlands who was really good and cost half the price. That person was also working remotely, and they were working on a faster Internet connection that made it easier for me to actually work with them than somebody working 20-30 miles away in Britain.

“People need to be careful what they wish for, within white collar jobs people think that working from home is a sort of net gain, because they don’t have to pay for the season ticket for example. Not only are they missing a lot of social aspects and a lot of other things that they need to be in the office for, the real danger is that a lot of jobs could actually move overseas where they speak very good English and are very well educated and they can do it cheaper than they can in the UIC In Hertfordshire a lot of people are well paid for what they do because they’re good at it, but also because you just can’t get anybody to do that job in the southeast of England for less than x thousand pounds.

“What happens if you can get somebody to do that for half the price somewhere else? If everyone is working from home, there is no difference. We’re used to that happening with blue collar work with factories, but actually I think this could start happening with white collar work too. People assume that high salaries are just a way of life, but it is not always going to be like that, so I think we have to be careful about rushing too fast into the working from home.”

Bim Afolami, Member of Parliament for Hitchin and Harpenden, was speaking to biz4Biz members via the Zoom platform as part of a Connexions networking meeting.