LEP must remain focussed on big picture

Business leaders today welcomed the government’s decision to allocate £14.9 million to the Greater Birmingham and Solihull Local Enterprise Partnership (LEP) to help get building projects off the ground.

But Jerry Blackett, chief executive of Birmingham Chamber of Commerce Group (BCCG) urged the LEP to also remain focussed on the bigger picture.

He said: “This is a very welcome gesture of faith from the Government in LEPs generally and Greater Birmingham and Solihull in particular. It should give a welcome shot in the arm to the construction industry, which has been badly hit in the current economic climate.

“However, the LEP must remain focussed on a few strategic goals, seeking to maximise their influence over mainstream budgets for things like employment and skills and major transport projects. Of course it is useful to win additional monies but the new sums are very small compared to, for example, the £6 – £7 billion of tax-payers money that gets spent just in Birmingham each year. Our economy will get transformed by making best use of these sums. The great thing about the LEP is the invitation it has from government to create an economic strategy. Delivery of this then comes from the alignment of all mainstream budgets, which needs national agencies in particular to challenge the way they worked in the past.”

The government’s £500 million Growing Places Fund is designed to ‘help boost economic growth by getting the required infrastructure built to enable the creation of new jobs and homes by getting stalled projects moving again’.