PROPOSALS for 24 new Local Enterprise Partnerships (LEPs) were approved by Business Secretary Vince Cable today and while bids for the Birmingham Chamber Group and Coventry and Warwickshire were included, separate bids for the Black Country and the West Midlands as a whole have been excluded.
Bids for Stoke-on-Trent and Staffordshire and The Marches – Shropshire, Telford and Wrekin and Herefordshire – were also included in the two dozen successful bids announced by Mr Cable.
The new LEPs are set to take on the economic development function currently controlled by Advantage West Midlands when the regional development agency closes in March 2012.
The announcement brings to an end months of speculation about the likely make-up of the region’s economic development policy.
Birmingham Chamber Group, whose bid includes the chambers of Solihull, Cannock, Lichfield, Tamworth and Burton-upon-Trent, said the business community had to take full advantage of the announcement.
Jerry Blackett, chief executive of the BCCG, said: “Irrespective of the loss of regional development agencies and the arrival of LEP’s, the Spending Review announcement by the Chancellor means there would have been little new money around anyway.
“LEPs provide a platform for the private sector to have significant influence over mainstream budgets which will still, for example, be in the order of £15 billion a year in our LEP area.
“LEPs also allow us to identify a small number of important priorities into which we can all focus our collective efforts and resources. Some of these will not require new money but simply, better co-ordination/joining up of existing efforts/spend.
His counterpart at the Coventry and Warwickshire Chamber, Louise Bennett, said: “It is an exciting step. It is a chance to work differently and ensure that those who create the wealth and the jobs in the economy are at the heart of the decisions that affect economic conditions.
“The Government made it very clear that they wanted the private sector to play a leading role with local authorities and other bodies in the creation of LEPs across the country.
“I believe the fact that Coventry and Warwickshire has grasped that point from the outset and understood that the LEP is about economic growth and job creation has been crucial.”
As part of the overall policy on future economic development ministers also declared the £1.4bn Regional Growth Fund open for business.
The fund will support the creation of private sector jobs and will particularly support communities currently dependent on the public sector, helping them make the transition to private sector led growth and prosperity.
Labour has criticised the strategy and claimed that the £1.4bn will be massively oversubscribed and could be swallowed up in the first round of bidding when it should have to last for three years.
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