The body tasked with growing the North East economy is pushing the Government to provide more substance to some of its key policies as it tries to help the region emerge from the pandemic slump.
Leaders from the North East LEP say they are eagerly waiting details on the Government’s levelling up white paper, which was postponed from its original publication date before Christmas and is now reported to have been pushed back further.
They also want to know about more about how the Shared Prosperity Fund - the UK’s replacement for the EU funding that has been crucial to the North East in recent years - will affect its work in trying to kickstart the region’s economy after the twin blows of Brexit and the pandemic.
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Their plea for information has come after the region last week regained its unwanted position as the UK region with the highest unemployment, with that rise in jobless coming counter to a reduction nationally. A number of other indicators have also suggested that the region’s economy is recovering from the pandemic much slower than other areas.
Speaking at the North East LEP’s AGM, the organisation’s chief executive Helen Golightly said it was “critical” to have some clarity on what the Government’s levelling up white paper will say in terms of policies and potential funding for regions like the North East, as well as details on the UK Shared Prosperity Fund, plans for skills and training and the Government’s enterprise strategy.
The LEP is also waiting details from the Government on its own future, with Ministers pondering what to do with local enterprise partnerships around England.
Ms Golightly said: “With the figures that came out last week, we could see a further rise in unemployment and a drop in the activity rate. There’s fewer people in the labour market, that’s what the statistics showed.
“The critical thing for me is that this is about people, it’s about families and the need to get a job. It’s about real things to real people, and this is why we take our job so seriously in terms of trying to get that policy right.
“Before the pandemic and before we came out of Europe, the trajectory on the strategic economic plan was definitely right, and we really believe that is still the case but we need to work with Government to really translate that levelling up agenda into the North East in terms of funding particularly, but also around some of the policy areas.”
The LEP’s strategic economic plan, which set the target of helping companies create 100,000 ‘more and better’ jobs between 2014 and 2024 was ahead of target, both in terms of jobs created and the standard of those jobs, before the pandemic.
The LEP was part of a wider body that has sought Government funding for the North East in a bid to ensure the region’s recovery does not follow the pattern of previous downturns, where other parts of the country bounced back more quickly.
Recent announcements on the creation of the UK’s first two battery gigafactories at Sunderland and Blyth have both come at projects where early funding was provided by the LEP.
But chief financial officer Paul Woods said there was “uncertainty” over the organisation’s funding for the coming year and it hoped to get more clarity from the Government soon.
Also at the AGM, Ms Golightly said the LEP was supportive of efforts to deliver greater devolution to the region, with council leaders in the North East in talks with the Government over getting more powers to the region.
