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Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire Chamber of Commerce is encouraging business leaders to attend a meeting to discuss the formation of the Derbyshire, Nottinghamshire and city councils’ Local Enterprise Partnership. The chamber said that it was seeking views about the direction the LEP should take, and give firms the opportunity to highlight issues which any bids from the £1.4bn Regional Growth Fund should address.

The chamber said that it is expecting about 150 business leaders to attend the meeting.

Last week, government gave the green light to proposals to form a new Local Enterprise Partnership (LEP) for Derby, Derbyshire, Nottingham and Nottinghamshire to fill the void left by the East Midlands Development Agency, which will be scrapped in 2012.

The chamber has now called an emergency meeting of all businesses, which takes place at the Hemsley Conference Centre at the University of Nottingham at 8am on 16 November.

The new LEP will be led by a board made up of senior private sector representatives and local authority leaders, which will give strategic direction to the partnership.

A shadow board will meet this month to set out the LEP's role and priorities until the full board is in place by late 2011.

George Cowcher, chief executive of the Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire Chamber, said that the priority for everyone behind the LEP was “to help build a powerful entity that can maximise the benefit for businesses in both counties, and develop a dynamic economy”.

“Government has made it perfectly clear that the LEP must be private sector-led, so we quickly need to establish what businesses in Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire want from this new partnership and how this can be delivered.

“With future funding for business support likely to be scarce, we also need to know from business what the Regional Growth Fund priorities should be to ensure that our two counties fully benefit from this important source of regeneration cash.”