CV One Ltd formed as the result of a merger between the City Centre Company (Coventry) and Coventry and Warwickshire Promotions. CV One is unique in Britain in combining the twin functions of managing Coventry’s city centre and promoting the City and its surrounding region as an attractive place in which to invest, work, live and visit.
Operating with around 90 staff from two sites in central Coventry, it is responsible for carrying out a huge number of tasks, from managing car parks, CCTV and street cleansing to public events, conference and tourism work of all kinds. It has an annual budget of more than £9 million.
Core funding comes from Coventry City Council but the Company is in effect an arms-length organisation with an independent Board of Directors, drawn from the private sector as well as the local authority.
Until April 2005, at the heart of CV One’s core activities lay commercial membership schemes covering city centre businesses, principally retailers and leisure sector operators, plus tourism businesses, such as hotels and attractions, from a wide area of Warwickshire as well as from Coventry itself. Apart from the tourism membership scheme, all the other schemes have now been incorporated into the Coventry City Centre BID.
CV One also manage the official visitor website for the sub-region of Coventry & Warwickshire, www.visitcoventryandwarwickshire.co.uk.