LEP to open purse strings on £25m Growing Places fund
GREATER Manchester’s Local Enterprise Partnership (LEP) will soon issue a call for organisations to bid for funding for a share of a £25m pot to fund infrastructure projects.
The LEP’s chairman, Mike Blackburn, spoke to an audience at a pro.manchester lunch yesterday about the recent award of £25m to the city region via the Growing Places Fund.
“We’ve now got to put in place a call for projects to decide how we spend that – It could be anything from regeneration projects, building projects, digging up roads, technology, or it can be about science and innovation but it must be about growth in the economy,” he said.
Mr Blackburn said that he felt Greater Manchester’s LEP had progressed well as it had benefited from much of the structures and ethos of public and private sector co-operation which was already in place in the city.
For instance, he said the formation of the Greater Manchester Combined Authority as a distinct legal entity in April meant the city region now enjoys more influence over transport spending than any other area outside London.
Similarly, it is currently lobbying cities minister Greg Clark for more powers over areas such as skills, inward investment and business support through the government’s Deal for Cities initiative.
“We’ve had several meetings with Greg Clark over the past couple of months setting out what needs to be devolved from central government to local government in order to grow our economy, get better cohesion and get better skills.”
He said the LEP “have actually managed to do pretty well” in winning funding – particularly the £60m secured through the recent Regional Growth Fund bids.
Around £30m of that will go to five “business-led” projects including Port Salford and Siemens’ Green Technology Centre which will create an estimated 7,500 jobs.
The remaining £30m will be spent on a programme – or series of programmes – devised by the LEP.
“As of today, I can’t tell you what I’m going to spend the money on because I don’t know. What I do know is we’ve got several dozen programmes that have been put forward by the Chamber, businesses and groups like the Institution of Chartered Accountants (ICAEW).”
Mr Blackburn also argued that the other major intervention made by Greater Manchester’s LEP to date was in convincing the government to commit £50m towards a project to commercially exploit graphene – the super-strong material discovered by Manchester University physicists Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselo.
“It was likely to be exploited by business offshore,” said Mr Blackburn. “We’d already heard that South Korea were putting $150-160m into the exploitation of graphene. So the people here in this city, supported by the LEP, went to see the right people to say ‘you need to put some money behind this in he UK’.”
He added that the LEP’s task with graphene was far from over, though, and it now needed to convince the government to spend a significant portion of that in the city.
“We think the only place in the UK where we can really exploit it is here in Greater Manchester, linking potentially to Daresbury as well.”
