How has Imelda Havers, the boss of North Yorkshire's new inward investment organisation done in her first half year? RON GODFREY finds out.

IT'S been six months since Imelda Havers took over an expanded inward investment organisation covering York and North Yorkshire, but don't ask just yet about its success or failure.

These have been six months of carefully preparing the ground, then sowing seeds and the process hasn't stopped.

The clear likelihood is that a garden will bloom which will be so pretty and fragrant it is bound to attract outside businesses to the region like honey bees.

"But it's a case of work under construction," says Imelda, using a different metaphor.

Imelda's five-person, year-old organisation is the strange, but catchily-branded york-england.com. The mother-of-two took over as its chief executive from Frances Done, the former head of the Manchester Commonwealth Games organising committee.

Mrs Done had seen through her six months' brief - to oversee the transition of what had been a hugely-successful York Inward Investment Board into an organisation with a geographically broader remit.

Now, as successor, Imelda and her staff set about fact-gathering, contact making and enthusing businesses in the region to the point where they have begun to act as voluntary ambassadors .

And they have been reaching out for inward investors not just within Britain but beyond our shores. Imelda says: "We continue to maintain contact with consulates and embassies, American employers and business advisers, through the Internet, through UK Trade and Investment.

"We maintain links with several hundred people in Japan, where there is a lot of cultural and academic interest. We are building on that to bring business in."

Now she and her team have extended their programme to China, and played host to a number of diplomats, including the Chinese ambassador, two successive Japanese ambassadors and the Canadian High Commissioner.

And she is keen to attract high-quality food firms to the region, given that there are a number of institutions working on food research, such as Nestl and McCain; and that there are specialist premises to house them - in the grounds of Castle Howard, at Barker Business Park at Melmerby, near Ripon, at Leeming Bar and at Sherburn-in-Elmet.

And the fact-gathering goes on. It is necessary, particularly as areas like Selby, hard-hit by the closure of mines, were going to be offered as realistic places to which businesses could transfer or expand. For the moment Imelda and her team are focussing on key areas in the A1 corridor, the A64 corridor, as well as York and Selby.

And it's a long process. Private companies have to be moved by the arguments to consider moving. They have to be convinced that the staff skills they need will be on tap in North Yorkshire; that the price is right, and the office or factory suits their needs. Then they have to take that board decision and make plans... It can take years of persuasion, communication and hand-holding until they are finally in our midst.

Even then, Imelda's team has to ensure that there are enough "holding premises" to accommodate businesses until their custom-made headquarters are built. One example was the staff of the Central Science Laboratory who were found accommodation on York Science Park while their 500,000 sq ft headquarters were being built at Sand Hutton in the 1990s.

Of course there have been some recent successes for york-england.com, particularly when it comes to attracting high-tech businesses, the "high quality" jobs, as she calls them. These include -

The opening of a European outpost at Escrick of Swedish company Agrobransle AB which is leading the development of short rotation coppice in the supply of biomass fuels

The establishment by computer communications giant Azlan of a new multi-lingual help desk at Clifton Moor and

Luring Russian biotechnologist Slava Pavlovets from London to set up Yorkshire Bioscience Ltd in York Science Park's Biocentre - a company which will manufacture kits to diagnose "new diseases" and to detect genetically-modified organisms for the British bioscience community.

Many more are in the pipeline, but perhaps the starkest evidence of Imelda's success could come soon with the revelation that government ministers are seriously considering moving 250 civil service posts to York.

Updated: 09:42 Tuesday, June 22, 2004