Local Enterprise Partnerships

Andrew Lewer Excerpts

Wednesday 16th March 2022 Westminster Hall

[Andrew Lewer (Northampton South) (Con)]

I thank you for your chairmanship, Ms Rees, and I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Hastings and Rye (Sally-Ann Hart) for securing this debate. The debate around LEPs is of particular interest to me because when I was leader of Derbyshire County Council from 2009 to 2013, I was there, in the thick of it, when the old regional development agencies were dissolved and the new concept of local enterprise partnerships was created. I helped to create D2N2 and sat on the board of that LEP for some years, so I had a ringside seat in terms of the strengths and weaknesses that the new organisation brought to the table.

One great weakness was that there was a lot of overlap: different areas were in all sorts of different LEPs, which caused all sorts of problems. There was, perhaps, a weakness of political will in the centre, with that sort of washing machine salesman theory of politics: someone creates something exciting, and for six months Ministers talk about it as the great solution to everything; then, something else comes along and interests fade or distractions happen.

I got a sense of that when I was the Member of the European Parliament for the East Midlands, where I was the European Conservatives and Reformists group co-ordinator for the Committee on Regional Development. It was certainly clear there that regions were still where it was at, whatever we had decided to do in England. From 12 months after the creation of LEPs, the background of a lack of central focus and drive was sometimes quite apparent.

Since my election as Member of Parliament for Northampton South in 2017, I have worked closely with SEMLEP, the South East Midlands Local Enterprise Partnership, on a range of issues such as local town regeneration, company growth funding pots and larger, more ambitious investment programmes—it is almost a sort of Voldemort moment—such as the Oxford to Cambridge arc. Over the past 12 to 13 years, I have seen what works well and what does not work so well, and I have some general observations to make from my experience, given the current time and context. Policy initiatives such as levelling up are hitting the ground just as the economically damaging covid emergency finally recedes and just in time for a whole new set of economic pressures. This fits in well with my time and role on the Levelling Up, Housing and Communities Committee and as chairman of the devolution all-party parliamentary group.

First, LEPs are not perfect. There are issues around geography; not all LEPs fall very neatly within boundaries. There are some perceived overlaps, and in the case of the Oxford-Cambridge arc, we could see some perceived underlaps. It is worth noting that the Oxford-Cambridge arc LEPs tried to adapt and co-operate with other LEPs to meet the milestones. That has been encouraging, but the arc is not in the levelling-up White Paper, and now there is an explosion of question marks around it and its future.

The LEPs themselves are not perfect, but they are there. They have a pool of critical knowledge, expertise and relationships to draw from. The machine works pretty well, so I would like the Minister to speak about the changes and whether growth funding pots will go through LEPs henceforth. Now, at this critical juncture, might not be the time to mess around with organisational architecture, tempting though it may be. We should not make the perfect the enemy of the good.

There are always risks. When Northamptonshire Enterprise Partnership dissolved a couple of years ago, not only the senior leadership but almost the entire staff—with their deep wells of knowledge and, critically, their interpersonal relationships—disappeared overnight. It has taken time for those gaps to be filled, a phenomenon that my hon. Friends the Members for Stroud (Siobhan Baillie) and for Hastings and Rye have referred to. I have personally had a good relationship with SEMLEP, and I am loth to start all over again when my focus in this instance is not so much on the vehicle as the destinations, looking for progress, not perfection.

My constituency has many challenges, as do the greater geographies of counties and regions, but they also have great opportunities for improvements, which is what our focus should be on. LEPs have the economic expertise, relationships, knowledge and history of public-private partnerships that we can draw on heavily. As my noble Friend Lord Lilley said many years ago, I have a little list, but I will simply say that Northampton has seen some great achievements through the LEPs, including the Vulcan ironworks, MAHLE Powertrain, Northampton College’s advanced engineering centre and digital skills academy, and MK:5G. Of course, there is displacement theory in the economy—just because money has been spent here, it does not necessarily mean it would not have been spent better by companies themselves, or elsewhere. This is spending packaged as investment; it is still taxpayers’ money. Nevertheless, that is a list of positive projects.

The LEP investment independent evaluation said that the return on investment for the whole programme will be £9 for every £1, so there is some good stuff there. I am always slightly suspicious of ROI figures—it always seems slightly like the Del Boy theory of investments: “Next year, we will be millionaires”—but nevertheless there is some good ROI there that can be effectively demonstrated. LEPs often operate on a larger scale than a local authority, but are obviously smaller and nimbler than central Government. They therefore have an important part to play in the delivery of our local growth and investment plans, imperfect as they are—imperfect as we all are.