Peterborough’s university research hub to focus on zero carbon technologies

An update on Phase Two of the University of Peterborough project on the Embankment has been delivered to Members of the Cambridgeshire and Peterborough Combined Authority (CaPCA).

Addressing the online meeting this week (September 14), of the Skills Committee, John Hill, CEO Business Board said: “I would remind members that Phase One of the plan was for a teaching building of 3,000 student’s capacity, for £30m and is due for completion in September 2022.

“The Phase One building addresses the 17,000 deficit in workers with a Level 5, 6 and 7 – a Diploma, a Degree or a Masters – and the high-level skills gap that we’ve got in Peterborough and the surrounding Fens.

“Phase Two is a complimentary development with, at its’ core, a principle that says there is no point in creating 17,000 more high-level skills if, at the same time, we don’t create 17,000 or more high-value jobs for those skill-holders to go into.

“Phase Two will therefore fund a Research Centre building on the University campus on the embankment that can become so much more than just a research centre in that it will become the core of an innovation ecosystem of companies and research organisations that will replicate – albeit in a more modest way – the world class system that sits in and around Cambridge.

“The funding for this is £14.6m of what would’ve been called ‘Local Growth Fund’, but has now been renamed the ‘Get Building Fund’ by Prime Minister, Boris Johnson’s initiative to get building and put money into the construction sector to create jobs.

“We will be working with two applicants for that funding because the full £14.6m is an allocation of funding to us, and we still need an application for that funding to pull that money down.

“The two applicants are Photocentric Ltd, a high-tech company in Peterborough, and Peterborough City Council.

“Once that application has gone through our Local Growth Fund Assurance process, external, independent evaluators and an entrepreneur assessment panel – it will be presented to the CaPCA Business Board for final approval and ratification, we will run a procurement for an organisation to run that R&D Centre.

“We will then ‘curate’ into it high-value-adding, research companies that can do research around the theme of ‘net-zero’ carbon technologies, working with the companies around Peterborough and up to the Fens and down into the Ox-Cam Arc Technology Corridor.”

Peterborough-based Photocentric Ltd, has been at the cutting edge of innovation in Photopolymers since 2002, winning the Queens Award for Enterprise Innovation for the third time in 2020, having previously won the same in 2016, and for Enterprise in International Trade in 2018. Photocentric manufactures a wide variety of materials that harden in light, and are Patent holders in visible light curing technologies that over the last twenty years have supported a broad range of applications.

The next meeting of the CaPCA Skills Committee will be November 9, 2020.