Recession is a pretty normal state for me. After all, I graduated into a recession. In essence, I was poor for the three years that I was a student, I was dirt poor for the three years that I was a student politician, and then I was poor for at least another five years in my first two or three jobs.
In fact it wasn't until I left the grit and dust of the London Docklands Development Corporation to join Stanhope in dear old Bruton Street in 1988 that I began to taste a little luxury. I will never forget it. I left my soulless semi in Beckton and rented a room in a house with some posh girls near Chiswick Park. It was 1988 and I began to develop a taste for champagne. I bought a Russell and Bromley handbag. It was - I fondly imagine - a bit like coming out of some Eastern European state to live in San Tropez
So being poor is my norm really. Or at least it was. And I was very struck by a quite wonderful man who was at the local government gig with me on Monday. His name is Graham Burgess and he is chief executive of the Blackburn with Darwen Borough Council (yes, it is "with" rather than "and"; the acronym for his authority being BWD rather than the more obvious BAD).
I'd never met him before, but your man Burgess is a saint really, having rallied all his local district authorities, metropolitan borough councils and part of the county council behind the "Pennine Lancashire Leaders and Chief Executives" (PLLACE) initiative leading to the formation of a ground breaking multi-area agreement (MAA) for his beauteous chunk of England, including the extremes of the Ribble Valley and some pretty knackered urban settlements.
It must have been like herding cats, but he has delivered. What an inspiration! And what an analysis! When he says "recession is not news to us in Blackburn, Blackburn has been in recession for several decades", it certainly has the ring of truth.
The simple fact is that there are large tracts of this country for which the market has never delivered, not since the closure of the pits, or the steel works, or the cotton mills, or whatever it was that caused the urban settlement to be there in the first place. We still have no response to how these places are going to work, what is their identity and purpose, what they are for. We have squandered the 15+ years of the rising market not dealing with these places and some commentators - such as the luminous Burgess - can be forgiven for having an ironic chuckle at the ostentatious pain of the Mayfair and City Johnnies now.
And what of the MAAs? A multi-area agreement is designed to be a cross-boundary local area agreement or LAA (sincere apologies for the preponderance of three-letter acronyms - TLAs - oh welcome to my world!) and they are supposed to bring together key players in flexible ways to tackle issues that are best addressed in partnership - at a regional and sub-regional level. The major issues that MAAs are supposed to tackle would include skills deficits, housing market imbalances, transport and infrastructure projects and economic development (and, as with all government initiatives, easier said than done!).
Time will tell. But regions or sub regions networking together to leverage economies of scale and deliver benefits locally, seems like a sound model. I was deeply impressed by Kent County Council joining forces with the health service and the police and other public sector agencies to bulk buy energy last year. It has to be the way to go. All power to those in PLLACE for being smart and resourceful in these straitened times.
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