LEPs look to secure £50m of Yorkshire Forward assets

TALKS are under way to divide £50m of Yorkshire Forward assets between the developing local enterprise partnerships and resist any attempt by Ministers to seize them when regional development agencies are abolished.

A list of Yorkshire Forward assets circulated among council leaders includes a wide range of property interests from the leasehold to Barnsley Metropolitan Centre valued at more than £11m to a fish and chip shop in Scarborough estimated to be worth £100,000.

The Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) has avoided making any commitments on what will happen to the assets of regional development agencies when they are wound up in 2012 and replaced by a network of new organisations known as local enterprise partnerships led jointly by business and councils.

Yorkshire Forward chief executive Thea Stein is leading a committee of Yorkshire council chief executives that will together oversee the transition from the RDA to LEPs, including the transfer of assets.

Andrew Waller, leader of City of York Council, said: “A lot of these assets are actually regeneration projects so they were bought with a purpose in mind and that’s what they should be used for in the long term.

“We want to make the case for regeneration assets to be retained under local control. We are realists, but if we don’t make the case then who will?

“Until the local enterprise partnerships, and perhaps the Yorkshire Enterprise Partnership, are established there is only local authorities in a position to say we shouldn’t rush in and flog these assets.”

Council leaders in Yorkshire have agreed that all the LEP proposals sent to the Government from the region will include a request that they should take control of the Yorkshire Forward assets in their respective areas.

They will also ask that LEPs be given the power to make local agreements over assets that span more than one area.

Proposals have already emerged for LEPs centred on the Leeds and Sheffield City regions, another for North Yorkshire and a fourth covering Hull and East Riding.

A BIS spokeswoman said the future of regional development agency assets would be set out in the forthcoming White Paper on sub-national growth to be publised in the autumn.