Perplexing Presentations and Fabricated and Induced Illness in...
Sept 5 2024
Bevan Brittan Education Lunchtime Training Webinars 2024
Read MoreThe much-heralded White Paper on local growth has at last arrived. As most of its proposals have been drip-fed into the media over the past few months, it holds few surprises but it does provide some information on how the plans are to be put in place. Many questions, though, remain unanswered.
The much-heralded White Paper on local growth has at last arrived. As most of its proposals have been drip-fed into the media over the past few months, it holds few surprises but it does provide some information on how the plans are to be put in place. Many questions, though, remain unanswered.
"Local growth: realising every place’s potential” sets out the Government’s role in empowering locally driven growth, encouraging business investment and promoting economic development. Its stated aim is to put businesses and local communities in charge of their own futures. It focuses on three key themes:
This Alert highlights the key issues in the White Paper and discusses the implications for local authorities.
The Paper confirms that the forthcoming Public Bodies Bill will abolish the eight RDAs. Most of their functions will be devolved to the local level, although some, such as regional workforce skill strategies, will simply stop. RDAs are expected to complete the winding down of their activities by April 2012. The Paper sets out how their functions will transfer and the transition phase. RDAs need to review their current contractual commitments and seek to exit from projects by exercising break clauses or through renegotiation, unless doing so will offer poor value for money, or would impact upon key flagship projects which might be continued by local authorities, local enterprise partnerships or other successor bodies.
Local Enterprise Partnerships (LEPs) will replace RDAs, providing the clear vision and strategic leadership to drive sustainable private sector-led growth and job creation in their area. The Government particularly encourages partnerships working in respect to transport, housing and planning as part of an integrated approach to growth and infrastructure delivery.
Local areas will be able to decide on their own structure that best meets local circumstances and opportunities, although governance structures will need to be sufficiently robust and clear to ensure proper accountability for delivery. The constitution and legal status of each LEP will be a matter for the partners. However, it is expected that at least half the board members will come from business, and that the chair will be a prominent business leader or, in larger cities, the elected Mayor.
The paper details the 24 partnerships that have been given the go-ahead to establish their boards.
This will be achieved through:
There will also be incentives for local authorities to deliver sustainable economic development, including:
The Government is also considering other options to enable councils to retain locally-raised business rates. It will look at these, along with other radical ways of encouraging local economic growth, in a Local Government Resource Review to be launched in January 2011.
The Government will intervene and make strategic investments to tackle market failures. The key measure to achieve this is the Regional Growth Fund that was announced in the June 2010 Budget. The objectives of the Fund are to stimulate enterprise by providing support for plans and programmes, to create additional private sector employment, and to support areas in making the transition from being public sector dependent to private sector led growth.
The Regional Growth Fund is now open to bids from all areas (including social enterprises but excluding purely public sector bodies) and will close on 21 January 2011. Bids must demonstrate a compelling contribution to delivery of sustainable increases in private sector employment and economic growth and must meet detailed criteria. A second round will be announced in early 2011.
The Government is working on new delivery structures for the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) that is currently delivered by the RDAs. It will also encourage alignment of the Regional Growth Fund with ERDF, where the aims of bids are eligible for support from both Funds. The new delivery structure will be announced at Budget 2011.
The paper introduces some fundamental changes to the current landscape of sub regional growth, economic development delivery and planning. Although detail will follow in, for example, the Localism Bill (expected at the end of November) and the Local Government Resource Review (January 2011) there are already significant issues for authorities to digest and plan for. In particular:
We use necessary cookies to make our site work. We'd also like to set optional analytics cookies to help us improve it. We won't set optional cookies unless you enable them. Using this tool will set a cookie on your device to remember your preferences. For more detailed information about the cookies we use, see our Cookies page.
Necessary cookies enable core functionality such as security, network management, and accessibility. You may disable these by changing your browser settings, but this may affect how the website functions.
We'd like to set Google Analytics cookies to help us to improve our website by collection and reporting information on how you use it. The cookies collect information in a way that does not directly identify anyone.
For more information on how these cookies work, please see our Cookies page.