State of the Region Survey: have your say on LEPS
AS WEST Midlands businesses ushered in the New Year of 2010, they knew that a general election would bring changes to the environment they operated in, but few expected a new Government to be so ruthless in its eradication of RDAs and other business support bodies.
Business Link, AWM and dozens of industry quangoes are being swept away with an urgency that has astonished many business groups – and caught many others unprepared for the rate of change.
This summer saw business organisations and local authorities frantically trying to meet a tight deadline to submit proposals to form the bodies that were to replace the outgoing RDAs.
LEPs – Local Enterprise Partnerships – are expected to take the lead on local economic development, according to the Government. They should be business-led and bring together the public and private sectors to promote skills development, job creation and major regeneration projects. There’s just one catch – they’ll have a fraction of the money that used to e channelled through the RDAs.
The other problem is business support itself – despite business secretary Vince Cable’s exhortations to get ‘real’ business leaders involved, most have stood on the sidelines shaking their heads at the spectacle at what they believe is a rushed process to create bodies that will have precious little money or powers to achieve anything.
Now that most of the fledgling LEPs have been given the green light to proceed, however, businesses are asking more questions about what they will do and how they will operate.
Russell Orme, managing partner of DLA Piper’s Birmingham office said: “It’s challenging 12 months for businesses of every shape and size. Realism is probably the overriding sentiment as we approach 2011.
“Talking about a new era of austerity is perhaps overstating it – many of us have seen difficult economic conditions before – but there’s obvious concern about what sort of landscape will emerge once the full impact of the Government’s spending review has sunk in.”
In our major survey of the views of business leaders in the West Midlands, run in conjunction with law firm DLA Piper, we will be focussing on the role of LEPs in an attempt to gauge for the first time the level of understanding about what they do.
Other questions for our 55,000 subscribers aim to provide a measure of business confidence across three major regions of the UK, and the results will therefore indicate the issues that LEPs need to address.
Your answers matter and knowing how time is precious for those running businesses, we have made the survey quick and simple – it will take you no more than three minutes to complete.
[FORM: 38]
