Greater Manchester to set up interim LEP
GREATER Manchester’s political leaders are setting up a new “shadow” LEP to work with the North West Development Agency and central government departments in a bid to take over assets such as European Regional Development Funding and business support services quickly.
The move was revealed by Manchester City Council chief executive Sir Howard Bernstein at an event explaining local economic partnerships held by Greater Manchester’s Chamber of Commerce at The Palace Hotel yesterday.
Sir Howard said that the interim LEP would be established “to ensure that the transition from regional to sub-regional delivery structures is structured and is as rapid as possible”.
Its membership will consist of the chair and three other representatives from the Association of Greater Manchester Authorities, Business Leadership Council chair John Early, Midas chair Michael Oglesby, Marketing Manchester chair Nick Johnson and the president of Greater Manchester’s Chamber of Commerce, David McKeith.
“We believe that having a shadow LEP up and running – and we believe that we could start that work next week – will give us the strongest base to integrate our activities and at the same time demonstrate to government our capacity not only for real leadership but also for clear and decisive delivery,” said Sir Howard.
He said that he believed it was important for the management and accountability functions of ERDF spending to be retained in the areas where the funding decisions were taking place.
“We want to ensure business support services, which are now regionally based, are increasingly reconfigured at a sub-regional level and that they are able to be discharged at a sub-regional level as quickly as possible.”
Greater Manchester’s authorities will submit their bid to run a city region-wide Local Economic Partnership to the government on September 6th, although the precise form that the partnerships will take is unlikely to be known until the coalition government completes its Spending Review in November.
Sir Howard said that the formation of the partnership provided “clear opportunities” for the city-region to tackle many of the issues which were highlighted in the Manchester Economic Independent Review, published last year, such as tackling worklessness and creating a workforce with the most appropriate skills.
“I believe the time has never been better for public sector reform. I’ve been arguing for that for well over two years.”
