Talking Point: The LEP vacuum
A month ago, I wrote a letter to David Cameron asking why he was scrapping the Regional Development Agencies and replacing them with Local Enterprise Partnerships.
It took two weeks to get a reply, which told me my concern had been passed on to the relevant person and someone would be in touch. I am still waiting.
I accept that my letter would not be the most pressing item in Mr Cameron’s “in” tray. But the irony is that EMDA – the very organisation which has now been given the chop – would have prevented me from writing the letter in the first place because it acted as a go-between between local businesses and central government. That channel of communicaton is now closed.
Instead, we’re getting LEPs. There has been much talk about how these more nimble bodies will help local industry and how the geography better matches the economic landscape, but I have my doubts.
With the demise of EMDA, our region will go from having one powerful voice among nine RDAs nationwide to half a dozen or so quieter voices among nearly 60 LEPs.
The LEPs’ funding and power will be significantly less. Even though they’ll have a list of worthy projects to take on, their success depends entirely on the goodwill of the local business community.
What’s more, old sub-regional rivalries and pariochial squabbling – which are rife in the East Midlands - could once again come to the fore.
In fact, it will be pretty much as you were – and the region known as the East Midlands, a title we even had to fight our own airport for, will once again mean more in Brussels than it will in Westminster.
This concerns me, but it is not my major complaint. Instead, by announcing that it will scrap RDAs and replace them with LEPs, the government has created a vacuum of support just when the majority of SMEs need it the most.
EMDA may not be perfect, but it is by no means the worst RDA and, speaking from my point of view, it has helped me significantly.
I am 36 and have never run a company in a recession before, let alone a recession as deep and damaging as the one we have just experienced. Even in the good times, I was able to get advice from the very best people through EMDA’s business networks. In the bad times, that support has been invaluable.
I am not the only one. I am involved in EMDA’s Business Champions scheme, where entrepreneurs like me are asked to mentor others who are just starting out and give them advice.
This will now be scrapped, while other important EMDA initiatives will wither on the vine as the organisation winds down and the talented people within it leave.
Over the next two years we’ll have a declining service while we wait for LEPs to come along. And then, inevitably, they will have to bed in.
How long will that take? I reckon it took EMDA eight years to really become effective – too long, certainly, but will the LEPs fair better?
These are the last questions we need to be asking at this point in time. UK plc is in a critical situation and there is a long way to go until we recover.
Yet the the banks have already shown that they are unwilling to help businesses and now the government has ordered another major resource to shut up shop.
If they wanted to make a political point to the RDAs by asking them to raise their game, they could have done. They could have even used EMDA as the national example of how to do it. Perhaps they could at least order them to streamline and cut waste – not clear their desks.
Now is a time for the stability and consistency you get from established systems and whatever the Government do, now or in the future, should wait until the worst is over.
Instead, they have pulled the plug at a time when the need for support and tight, credible communication channels to the government is most acute.
