Business support funding could fall by two-thirds
FUNDING for business support services such as Business Link and UK Trade and Investment could drop by as much as two-thirds when the new Local Economic Partnerships take over such functions from the North West Regional Development Agency.
Speaking at a Local Economic Partnerships forum organised by Greater Manchester Chamber of Commerce yesterday, Manchester Solutions’ chief executive Richard Guy said that current levels of spending on business support spending by the RDA equates to around £60m in Greater Manchester alone – an increase from the levels of between £20m-£28m that Manchester Solutions used to spend when it was responsible for delivering the service between 2000-2006.
“Clearly, that’s not going to be the position in the future and already the NWDA is making extensive cuts in those programmes to get down to a new level as transition occurs towards the new LEP arrangements,” he said.
“We’re bound to come back down to less than the £20m kind of figure we had in the early 2000s. It’s never going to be anywhere near the £60m that the RDA spent.”
Mr Guy argued that as a result the LEP would have to change delivery methods for business support – scrapping the current brokerage service offered by Business Link where it points to private sector contractors and offers partial funding for any consultancy work then commissioned.
“That’s one of the things that’s cost much more money in the last couple of years,” said Mr Guy.
“We have to make sure that unlike the last few years we have an integrated system of business support that can do things in a coherent and integrated way and therefore save money in doing so.”
He argued that funding constraints also meant that the organisation which ends up delivering business support services for the LEP would have to charge full prices for some of its services, and said that “the days where grants were available for innovation and investment are probably already over”.
Out-going Greater Manchester Chamber chief executive Angie Robinson also said that the Chamber, which counts around 5,300 of Greater Manchester’s estimated 80,000 businesses among its members, would need to work with other business organisations to ensure that the LEP properly fulfils its remit for business support.
