Little Place for the 'local' – Part II

On the face of it, councils and LEPs may take heart from the department’s new growth plan, published alongside the Budget. It appears, for instance, to give them a lead role in the development of enterprise zones - intended as places where the manufacturing firms of the future will invest and grow. 

However, the very fact that DBIS and Treasury identify a leading LEP role for enterprise zones rather emphasises the more numerous (and arguably more crucial) areas of economic strategy where local leadership remains invisible.

The spending review last year allocated £200m over four years to invest in supporting manufacturing through the establishment of elite Technology and Innovation Centres (TICs).

The business model of the centres draws on excellence in university research to accelerate the commercialisation of new and emerging manufacturing technologies. Last week DBIS announced the first such centres – in high-value manufacturing. This brings together seven research centres - two in Rotherham; two in Coventry; one each in Bristol, Durham/Redcar, and Glasgow.

Ambitious local areas will welcome government’s promotion of high-value manufacturing; and most will see these industries as future sources of economic growth, employment and prestige for their area. In particular, Rotherham & Coventry will be encouraged by being designated innovation centres. The individual centres consider “TIC status will help attract inward investment into high-value manufacturing clusters around each centre“.

However, DBIS’ plan for growth makes no reference to a local authority or LEP role in in the innovation centres – nor indeed other manufacturing support. This will raise concerns of how inward investment around each centre will be delivered and supported; and what traction other areas who do not host one of the centres have for accessing support of this nature for their manufacturing ambitions.

Amounts to be allocated to TICs are modest and divided between seven centres. DBIS is coy about precise amounts per innovation centre, but with £200m over four years for all innovation centres (a further five or six centres are to be announced in due course), the comparison with the international models for the centres – e.g. the Fraunhofer Technical Institutes in Germany or their equivalent in the Netherlands – with their annual budgets of Euro 1.6bn and Euro 100m respectively – looks lightweight.

Secondly, the seven centres themselves are very much products of, and have been shaped by, the former government’s regional development agencies. The six English centres received over £150m of readily identifiable investment from the RDAs (and probably much more); whilst north of the border Scottish Enterprise invested at least £17m in the Glasgow facility. With local authorities and LEPs having neither formal innovation powers nor resources on this type of scale, their leverage on the innovation centres will be indirect at best.

Finally, the extent to which the department’s Technology Strategy Board (TSB) as commissioner and core funder of TICs understands and empathises with ‘place’, and with the challenges and opportunities of local economic geographies, is hugely problematic and is not being prioritised by government.

Government is currently recruiting a chair and up to four board members of TSB. One of the dozen or so competences required by board members is identified as “understanding of innovation support at sub-national level”.

However this competence is then elaborated in terms of “including the work of the Devolved Administrations and experience of the activities of the Research Councils and of working within EU-funded research and development programmes”.

A government serious about localism and empowering LEPs might now be looking to bring some specific understanding of their new ‘localism’ to the TSB. But the recruitment micro-site makes it clear that ‘on this occasion’ the new chair and board members will bring significant credentials in innovation and technology success ‘from a business perspective’; with experience of operating outside the UK, across Whitehall, and on EU programmes, a distinct advantage. Yet again, the DBIS approach and priorities concede nothing to ‘localism’ and the Local Growth White Paper.

We are entering a pivotal period in determining how government’s strategies for economic growth move from general aspirations into specific delivery. For local leadership teams, we cannot be satisfied with occasional participation at times, places and in ways of government’s choosing; as illustrated by the announcement on enterprise zones. We need a clear stake in all major levers for delivering private sector business and jobs growth – and that means influence and involvement in government’s technology and innovation policies.

David Marlow is an economic development consultant at Third Life Economics and a former chief executive of the East England Regional Development Agency

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