RDAs to be abolished in favour of LEPs - Northants Chamber view
1. Introduction
1.1. Northamptonshire Chamber represents the interests of business members across the county, covering almost one third of the Northamptonshire workforce. No other business organisation has the geographic spread or multi-size, multi-sector membership that characterises the Chamber membership.
1.2. Northamptonshire Chamber is committed to making LEPs work. We are also committed to ensuring that the wealth-generating private sector plays a pivotal and central role in delivering comprehensive and transformative economic change across the county.
1.3. The business community is keen to exercise some leverage over economic development because issues like transport infrastructure, town centre development, business crime and skills provision affect the county’s prospects (this has been a basic tenet of Northamptonshire Chamber for over two decades as evidenced by our pioneering work as a CCTE as well as our involvement in the set-up of Northamptonshire Partnership and then more recently Northamptonshire Enterprise).
1.4. Given the extensive track record of this Chamber and its member companies in driving local economic development we are committed to continuing to play a central role in the implementation of LEPs. We stress, however, that LEPs must be transformative – with an innovative and clear vision for local economic change, driven jointly by private and public sector actors.
2. The functions of the LEP
2.1. LEPs must have a clear purpose from which their functions, geography and governance arrangements would logically flow. LEPs’ fundamental role must be to set out a clear long-term vision for the growth of the private sector as well as a short-term delivery plan that emphasises pragmatic, achievable actions by public and private sector bodies operating on the ground.
2.2. The Chamber believes that there are some clear functions that LEPs should co-ordinate to improve the local business environment. These should be narrowly drawn so that the LEP can get up and running quickly – and demonstrate their value to local businesses, who are often sceptical of new governance arrangements and initiatives. Key functions should be to focus on:
- Setting a clear, shared 30-year vision for enterprise growth for the area;
- Identifying existing barriers to business growth – e.g. in terms of land use planning, infrastructure, skills/labour market – and the actions required to remove these barriers; and,
- ‘Selling’ the area, by taking responsibility for bids for central government funding (e.g. the Regional Growth Fund) as well as levering in private sector resources to support priority local infrastructure projects.
2.3. Northamptonshire Chamber would like to see a degree of continuity for the local business community in the midst of radical reorganisation of the regional and sub-regional tiers of economic development, which could be achieved by building upon the working model already existing in Northamptonshire by which the business community already work in partnership with local government on economic development, i.e. Northamptonshire Enterprise.
2.4. The overriding issue to bear in mind is that the ultimate objective of the securing of funding from Government, i.e. the function of the LEP, is all important and geography is only a means to an end. The Chamber would, therefore, not be in a rush to commit our county to agreeing an LEP proposal just to meet the Government’s deadline as any proposal should be an honest appraisal of our county’s opportunities and any current proposal should therefore be seen as an outline proposal. With ten neighbouring counties, Northamptonshire has many opportunities to form strategic alliances for our benefit and should remain flexible in this respect.
Posted by: Northamptonshire Chamber
