Insider Media Limited

Sir Ian Wrigglesworth, deputy chairman of the £1.4bn Regional Growth Fund (RGF), has told Insider that those expecting an easy cash windfall will be disappointed.

Only bids that generate sustainable, profitable private business in areas relying heavily on the public sector will be considered for handouts, he said. The West Midlands is expected to put forward several major bids, including a £20m bid from Finance Birmingham, as exclusively revealed by Insider last week.

The bid deadline is today (21 January), and Sir Ian confirmed that he expects his panel, chaired by Lord Heseltine, to start making its first grants in March. But applications not sticking to the rules will be discarded.

He said: “A lot of people think we’re Father Christmas, but it will be more like Scrooge.

“The fund has two objectives – to create private sector employment in regions that there is an imbalance with the public sector, like the Midlands, and to build up the private sector in the long term."

According to Sir Ian, a good bid would be: “One that’s going to create a sustainable or third sector social initiative business that is going to go on to be profitable and last for a long time and create a lot of private sector jobs.

“It’s a competitive process. If one is better at leveraging more money from the private sector and creating more public sector jobs then those judgements will be made by the panel which are the best bets in the areas which are dominated by the public sector.

“Public sector work is very much a feature of regions like the Midlands. Other regions will be able to get funds but those fit the criteria much more easily.

“It could have considerable impact on the north/south divide over time. You can’t make massive changes to the economy in five minutes but you can change things by investing in the private sector in the hope of getting a more dynamic and stronger economy than there has been over the last few decades."

Along with a proposal from Finance Birmingham, Aston Reinvestment Trust (ART) and Birmingham Young Peoples Enterprise Project will also have their funding submissions put forward. Two Birmingham-based construction projects will also bid for funding, and the chairman of the Denys Shortt, Coventry and Warwickshire LEP, revealed that “at least nine” bids from its region had been proposed.

Now the bids are in, an interdepartmental team of civil servants will assess the bids and present them to the panel. Sir Ian expects start looking through applications within the next few weeks.

He said: “We have put our team under a lot of pressure to assess bids, because cuts will be underway. A lot have been announced but not a lot of redundancies have been made yet. But we want to make sure that the projects are up and running as quickly as possible.”