Clegg promises new spending in Yorkshire
DEPUTY Prime Minister Nick Clegg has promised new spending that will benefit Yorkshire alongside cuts in the Government’s comprehensive spending review later this month.
Speaking at the official opening of the Sheffield office of law firm Kennedys, Mr Clegg rejected the suggestion made earlier in the day by Sheffield businessman Kevin McCabe that there was no strategy behind the Government’s plans but accepted the abolition of regional development agency Yorkshire had lead to “anxiety”.
He also described the plan to create a new local enterprise partnership based on the Sheffield City Region, currently being considered by Ministers as a “very very strong proposal”.
Mr Clegg said: “What I hope you will see on October 20, far from unmitigated bad news we will be making a whole load of new announcements about new investments in our infrastructure, in energy, in transport, in the kind of things that we need to create jobs but also the kind of thing we need for our long term sustainable and prosperous future.
“What we are doing is saying some of the old mechanisms which we use to support South Yorkshire and Sheffield, like the regional development agency, need to give way to something which is more workable and closer to the ground.
“It’s clearly slight dsiruptive now as we turn a page on the old way of doing things and introduce new mechanisms – like the local enterprise partnership which will be up and running in the Sheffield region soon enough, like the regional growth fund to channel £1bn of money into areas such as Sheffield which have arguably been over reliant on public sector employment, such as the green investment bank which we will be announcing after October 20 which will be using lots of public money to act as seed finance for private investment into renewable energy infrastructure in South Yorkshire and elsewhere.”
Speaking after the event, Mr Clegg repeated the coalition government’s promise to look again at the Government’s decision to withdraw the loan offer to Sheffield Forgemasters.
