Development agency to be replaced by enterprise partnership

Greater Manchester is likely to form a local enterprise partnership (LEP) following the abolition of the North West Regional Development Agency.
In recent months local authority leaders across Greater Manchester and the wider region have been vocal in their support for the NWDA. But the executive of the Association of Greater Manchester Authorities (AGMA) has now decided that they can no longer support the continued existence of the agency. Instead they want to develop their own proposals to set up a LEP to take charge of economic development across the city-region.
LEPs will be particularly focused on England’s cities. They will be made up of consortia of councils banding together across sub-regions in partnership with business and will have responsibility for boosting the “co-ordination of public and private investment in transport, housing, skills, regeneration and other areas of economic development”.
AGMA’s submission to Government to form a LEP is due by 6th September 2010.
But the move by AGMA does not rule out “some form” of regional body remaining, Graham Burgess, Blackburn with Darwen Council chief executive, said. But he added that any regional body that did remain “would not be the RDA”.
He said: “It might, for example, have responsibility for co-ordinating major strategic projects, such as regional transport schemes - but it would be an investment agency and would be owned by and accountable to the local authorities.”