Midlands: World class region?

Geoff Maskell
Politics Show Midlands

Your comments on ID cards from Politics Show Midlands

The Politics Show investigates two organisations which over the next three years will be spending almost £1.5 billion of taxpayers money.

Longbridge business park would create 3,000 jobs

The East Midlands Development Agency and Advantage West Midlands aim to turn the Midlands into a world class region inside 10 years.

They have been at it for four years now but has anyone noticed a difference yet?

Regional Development Agencies were set up in 1999.

They were meant to be cost neutral, taking their funding out of the existing budgets of Government departments.

But the budgets, and the remit of RDAs have grown and grown.

Advantage West Midlands started with an annual budget of just over £100m.

Since then it has escalated faster than the others, by a total of 225%.

AWM's latest estimate is that they'll spend more than a billion pounds over the next three years.

With a budget of almost £217m last year Advantage West Midlands claim to have created or safeguarded 13,416 jobs.

That is an average cost per job of £16,168.

This year the budget is £256m.

In the same period ('02-'03) EMDA claim to have created or safeguarded 3,000 with their budget of £114 million.

That is £38,000 per job.

So do Regional Development Agencies offer value for money?

To put those colossal sums into context the annual budget for the Queen's Medical Centre in Nottingham, one of the region's biggest hospitals, is £235m.

Critics like the Tory MP, Peter Luff, say that RDA's are an unnecessary bureaucracy; another layer of government which bypasses the traditional structure of delivering government programmes, the County & District Councils.

Councils which he says are far more in tune with the local communities they serve than a regional agency ever could be and the budgets keep growing.

Over Committed?

The Fort Dunlop building requires redevelopment

The sheer scale of the initiatives AWM are involved with present a huge management challenge.

Experienced observers have told The Politics Show that AWM has promised more funding to projects than it can actually deliver.

Richard Bindless is Policy Director with the Confederation of West Midlands Chambers of Commerce.

Complex funding regimes maybe over a 1000 contracts and projects to run is actually quite a hard thing to do.

If they are overspent now then they have got to think carefully about managing that through the rest of their year.

There is anecdotal evidence I have heard that there is over-use of over-expensive consultants ...

Maybe a little more self-confidence on the part of themselves and their partners would help cut down on any excessive spend on management consultants.

Democratic Deficit

One significant difference between regional agencies and more traditional forms of local government is the question of democratic accountability.

Advantage West Midlands with its £256m budget next year is scrutinised by a committee of the great and the good; 60 local councillors, industrialists and academics, co-opted onto the regional chamber.

None of the chamber members are directly elected.

By contrast Coventry City Council, with an annual budget of almost £342m, has its priorities set and its actions scrutinised by 54 directly elected councillors.

One way of addressing the democratic deficit may be to create an elected regional assembly.

Three English regions; Yorkshire and the Humber, the North West and the North East are to vote next year on whether to go ahead with regional devolution.

Voters in the East and West Midlands won't be getting that opportunity.

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