Cheshire & Warrington Economic Alliance

Cheshire & Warrington Local Enterprise Partnership

a)Executive Summary:

b)Recommendations / Action Requested:

c)Details:

1. The main focus of our national and local political leaders over the past month has been on the national and local elections, and restrictions have been in place on new announcements. Whitehall’s focus has been on preparing policy briefing for all conceivable Election outcomes, some of which has involved us. But, as is always the case, two-thirds of that is now no longer relevant! Within the LEP, we have been using this period to do our own preparatory work for the post General Election world and putting the final arrangements in place to successfully manage the projects being funded through the Local Growth Fund.

1. The Conservative’s Election manifesto committed them to offering further devolution to cities that agree to establish elected Mayors, and to support LEPs in growing their local economies. The manifesto did not, however, offer any further detail and we will therefore have to see how the new Ministerial team wants to work with LEPs. As I said in my April report, however, we know that the Conservative team regards LEPs as one of their policy successes.

1. First payments from the Local Growth Fund were made from DCLG on 1 May. Alongside this we have been completing the work on the other systems required to ensure that we can manage our element of the Fund in an accountable and transparent way. The first formal project offer letters have been issued, and there is a paper later on the agenda about the transparency and accountability arrangements that DCLG have said we need to put in place. A particular feature of the offer letters is that they set out the funding profile for each project. Each profile is derived from the profile of our own funding from DCLG. If projects cannot meet their profile, their funding may be withdrawn.

1. We have entered into an excellent agreement with Cheshire East about the role they will play as the Accountable Body for the Local Growth Fund. We will be responsible for entering into the funding agreements for all the LGF projects and monitoring their delivery, with Cheshire East making payments on our behalf when we instruct them to do so. Cheshire East are also responsible for assuring DCLG that our systems are robust and their internal auditors will undertake a review of our systems and processes in the near future. We will cover the costs of that.

1. The LEP website is the key tool for ensuring that the LEP’s work is transparent and accessible to our stakeholders. To ensure that it can cope with the substantial volume of information that will need to be loaded onto it in future, we have had to re-design it. The launch of the new site was held back until after the General Election, but it will come on stream early by 13 May.

1. A Spending Review needs to be undertaken in Whitehall by the Autumn. Working with the Economic Development directors and the Strategy Board, we are aiming to identify the specific projects that we would want to bid for in further Local Growth Fund rounds likely to take place once the Spending Review has been concluded. We have a “half Awayday” booked for a first discussion of that for 28 May.

1. LEP Chairs have been meeting together as a Network for several years. As LEP budgets have grown there has been an increasing recognition of the need for LEP Chief Executives to get together as well to discuss policy and best practice. The most recent meeting of LEP Chief Execs agreed to establish three working groups to cover presentation, policy and operational delivery. I have agreed to be the informal convener of the last of these, my objective being that the Network shares approaches to the delivery of its programme and helping to reduce the risk that the LEPs generate 39 answers to the same problem.

1. The OECD has been reviewing the role of regional development agencies across the developed world. I was therefore invited to speak to their Regional Development Policy Committee (comprising representatives from virtually all the OECD member states) about England’s experience of switching from 9 RDAs to 39 LEPs. I was speaking alongside colleagues from Canada, Colombia and EURADA – the European Association of Development Agencies. As well as reflecting comparing and contrasting RDAs and LEPs, I also took the opportunity to put in a little plug for C&W as a great place to do business!

1. Some of the more interesting things to come out of the OECD event were the very different development agency models used in OECD member states, ranging from six RDAs in Canada (very deliberately arranged across provincial boundaries), to 55 in Australia. My own preparation revealed that LEP budgets are now broadly at the same level as those enjoyed by the RDAs in the final couple of years before abolition, but that LEP staffing levels are only around 20% of the RDA level.

d)Appendices: