Well done to the first round winners of the Local Enterprise Partnership bidding process . There was a noticeable gap in winners from the North East and I wonder whether this is a result of LEPs influencing the investment criteria to be set for the Regional Growth Fund.
If RGF will be a counter to the CSR cuts by providing a £1.4 billion investment pot to stimulate economic growth, then there has to clarity and certainty as to ‘what’, ‘where’ and ‘when’ that can occur given the high levels of new and sustainable jobs that have to come from somewhere in order to balance the books. A systemic failure in the previous government’s approach, through the RDA mechanisms, was the attempt to spread evenly the investment funds that were available. Spread the jam too thinly and all you can taste is the margarine. That approach also stimulated the ‘I want one too’ philosophy. It is no longer relevant generally (if it ever was) nor should it apply within the emerging LEP boundaries.
Local Government Members with sub-regional responsibilities……
To achieve its required effect, the RGF must deliver the type of economic growth that leads to ‘real’ job growth and not just adding value to the UK Plc Balance Sheet; the two are invariably not the same. So, for example, in the Greater Manchester LEP area, perhaps an understandable reaction from the local members in its 10 partner authorities would be to aim to grab a piece of the RGF pot for their respective authorities if not the wards they represent. They really must resist the urge! If not, the same mistakes will be made at a sub-regional level that occurred previously at a regional level. What’s different this time is that local members will be responsible and accountable for the decisions they make; the lack of accountability was always a criticism of the RDA mechanism. And that accountability will have a much broader geographical dimension if the investment returns from ‘place based productivity’ is to succeed and feed through to seeing employment growth. The ‘localism’ agenda must not become an excuse to grab RGF as and when the bids have been made and the funding levels are known.
And then there are the universities……
As we all have to be rethinking our funding and investment fundamentals, let’s not forget that a beneficiary of CSR, so far as investment for research and development budgets are concerned, has been our universities. Yes, their overall budgets have been decimated but, from where I’m sitting, the £900 million HEFC R&D allocation seems to have been ‘ring fenced’ at the expense of their future undergraduate and postgraduate cohorts. If future students are to have to increase further their ‘investment’ in Higher Education, then the institutions ought to be more accountable for meeting investment criteria that centres on new jobs created from their R&D spend. That employment growth must occur outside the university campus. Determining appropriate place-based productivity programmes must have our universities engaged in the process. Not so that they have ‘easier’ access to the RGF funding pot, so that they can be made accountable for their investing in the sub-regional agenda. Their R&D performance criteria must include demonstrating a capability to add to the ‘growth’ agenda and not simply as a consequence of making a ‘grab’ the self satisfaction that stems out of peer review recognition.
Tags: Economic, Government, Partnership
Print 
PDF
