Talking Point: Crossing the Atlantic
Admit it - who saw that one coming? It's fair to say that Friday's news, that developer Peel Holdings was planning to submit its own bid to form a local enterprise partnership (LEP), caught more than a few people off guard. Lord Peter Smith, the leader of the Association of Greater Manchester Authorities, issued a swift denial that Greater Manchester had any knowledge of the bid, while authorities in Liverpool also said they had not been made aware of Peel's plans.
The company's proposal centres around the Atlantic Gateway project - the development of around 50 key sites along the River Mersey and the Manchester Ship Canal over the next five decades. The scale of the scheme is truly huge - a potential Docklands for the North West if you will. Its investment strategy is said to be £50bn, with the bold aim of creating 400,000 new homes and 250,000 jobs by 2030.
Peel's vision is for a collaborative framework to be developed between the Manchester and Liverpool city regions, given the Atlantic Gateway project spans an area from Merseyside to north Cheshire, Chester, Halton, Warrington and into Greater Manchester.
Under the existing Northwest Regional Development Agency (NWDA) structure the company largely had the support it needed to press ahead with those ambitions. Earlier this year the concept was included in the draft Regional Strategy for the North West and in March the NWDA brokered a deal that saw five local authorities sign up to the vision for "a sustainable economic zone”.
But the deal lacked the crucial support of Manchester City Council. Chief executive Sir Howard Bernstein has been a strong opponent, saying the scheme had no labour market analysis and no analysis of the costs and benefits. He even went as far as saying the plans had "the potential to undermine and dilute economic growth in the North West".
While a disagreement between the city council and Peel is nothing new - few could forget the bitter battle two years ago over plans to impose congestion charging in Greater Manchester - Peel is clearly concerned that its grand plans will falter without a "broad regeneration policy" for the North West. LEPs could merely focus on local issues rather than the concerns of the wider region, with Manchester acting as another thorn in its side.
On the surface Peel's bid to form an LEP looks a non-starter. Given the LEP bids from the city regions of Manchester and Liverpool, and a submission from Cheshire and Warrington, it doesn't appear to have the backing of any local authority.
But does that really matter? While the letter sent to "local authority leaders and business leaders" by Vince Cable and Eric Pickles in June called on local businesses and councils to work together, it was deliberately vague as to the precise structure of an LEP. The general feeling from many on LEP bid writing teams is that the government doesn't yet know what it wants from an LEP - it'll only know when it sees a good bid.
Although Peel's submission can be seen as a call to the government to recognise the importance of the now scrapped Regional Strategies in its forthcoming White Paper on sub-national economic growth, it's a radical approach that could strike a chord. In today's Financial Times, Cable and Pickles said that LEPs could "transform the economic geography of the country – unconstrained by arbitrary boundaries and top-down prescription that did not work". An Atlantic Gateway LEP would certainly do that.
While it's unlikely that a bid from Peel could ever be progressed without support from local authorities - handing a commercial organisation of such power without any democratic accountability would be controversial to say the least - the submission has served to highlight the continued lack of clarity from the government. Telling authorities and businesses to form LEPs is one thing, but offering such little guidance or structure as to how they should do that has merely confused the process.
As for now, it seems as though the North West will submit eight bids to form LEPs. One can only speculate what the government will make of the Atlantic Gateway bid, although chances are it probably doesn't know itself yet.
Comments? Email David Casey, Insider
