TOMORROW the party conference season will come to an end when prime minister Theresa May gives her leader's speech to the Conservatives at their gathering in Birmingham.

Most of the attention at these events has been centred around issues such as grammar schools, internal party divisions and, of course, Brexit.

But what are the issues that the Furness business community would like to see the nation's political leaders address? And are our politicians serious about engaging with businesses at all?

Chris Nelson, the chairman of Ulverston's Business Improvement District, who also runs his own public relations firm, has definite views.

He said: "At a local level we have got two MPs who are helping in this area in Tim Farron and John Woodcock and they have been pretty active at dealing with people on a national level but I think the government and the parties as a whole do not understand businesses. They seem to have their own ideas."

He also believes there is a lack of understanding on issues that affect businesses not within the M25 corridor, and he does not believe infrastructure spending is being done wisely, highlighting the HS2 project between London and Birmingham as an example.

He said: "They need to try and do more about basic infrastructure and forget grand schemes like HS2.

"They could focus on improving the basics in Cumbria. It should be about improving road links and rail links.

"I would like to see them paying more attention to the regions."

Many of his points were echoed by Martin Blakstad, who runs Ulverston-based lighting and electronics company, Oxley Group.

He said: "I do think that they are listening but I am not sure that they are doing anything about what we say."

Addressing the skills gap is a priority. Mr Blakstad said: "There is an ageing population of experienced engineers and when that generation retires we are going to be left with a big skills gap."

To try and address this, Oxley has invested heavily in apprenticeships and six of its 160 staff in Furness are apprentices.

Recruiting apprentices of the right calibre can be an issue though, given that much bigger companies such as BAE Systems in Barrow and GSK in Ulverston are also recruiting.

Mr Blakstad called for a campaign to push engineering careers to school teachers.

He added: "The A590 is a huge improvement from what it used to be like but, by only making some of it dual carriageway, you still run into bottlenecks."

He also thinks there should be improved transport links between Furness and Manchester Airport, pointing out that often Oxley has had to pay for taxis for clients at a cost of about £120.

In addition, he pointed out the problems many small and medium-sized enterprises have in receiving grants and government contracts. The application process often complex and time consuming.

He said: "I do not believe grants are the best source of aid to SMEs as we would certainly prefer the government to provide soft loans based on specific business opportunities because funding is otherwise very difficult to access.

"An example might be when we are bidding to supply external lighting to a major aircraft manufacturer but they will not fund the specific product development and this most likely will significantly exceed £1m, which is too much working capital for an SME to tie up for five years before the aircraft comes into service and sales volumes becomes significant.

"If the government would stand behind companies on the basis they would be repaid over the lifetime of the programme, that would be a tremendous help."

Chris Ward, who chairs Cumbria's branch of the Institute of Directors, said: "I think that politicians do engage with the IoD, they just do not act on what has been said."

He wants politicians to use Brexit as an opportunity to remove what he described as "bureaucratic obstacles".