Recently in BIS Local Category

We had an excellent debate about the Enterprise Zone for the Royal Docks in the UKR Forum yesterday. The great Clive Dutton does a great job rallying for the cause on inward investment into the Royals. And on a global scale too! The big prize, as he sees it, is investment from the likes of Asia or the US. Siemens is already in place, of course, and is therefore the obvious example.  

And he is happy to brand the project "London" and not "Newham" on a global platform.  Of course, you wouldn't want to run the risk that the Royals is perceived to be different or separate from London (the old LDDC strap line was "why move to the middle of nowhere if you can move to the middle of London" and I vote we get that resurrected).
 
There was a feature in the Evening Standard this week about why Johnny Foreigner entrepreneurs liked London. And it would seem that they certainly do: in their droves! The recurring themes were the quality of the people (quality of education, universities, etc), and the latent entrepreneurial spirit.  There was an interview with an American who had deliberately set up his IT/dotcom business in London rather than Silicon Valley in order to take advantage of this. So Clive's bigging up the education element, especially his higher education offer, is also very sensible. 

Planning Resource Magazine this week carries the rather entertaining story that government ministers are preparing to establish a network of six regional teams intended to support the new "public-private-led" Local Enterprise Partnerships. One of my valued (although somewhat terse) correspondents, who is shortly to join a very prestigious planning consultancy (bravo Monsieur!), alerted me to the story in an e-mail thus: "The R Word. I thought the coalition had abandoned all regional structures - U-turn?"
 
The proposed regional teams are to be called "BIS Local". (This is a bit close to "Sainsbury's Local" for my taste; in a flippant moment on the bus the other day, I was wondering why Sainsbury's hadn't capitalised bit more on the splendid naming of their convenience stores in the localism debate. Sincere apologies to Sue Wilcox, she always has been a far subtler operator than me!)

The teams will "deliver areas of BIS policy, feed information on local economic issues back to Whitehall and provide locally based support and guidance to the joint public-private LEPs, which are intended to replace regional development agencies".

A BIS spokeswoman said: "It is important that BIS has a policy presence outside Whitehall so we can communicate effectively with local enterprise partnerships, businesses and other organisations. The network is still in the early stages of development, but it is expected that there will be six small teams in different parts of the country, although locations have not yet been confirmed. The teams will support BIS's overall objectives particularly those relating to growth, jobs and rebalancing the economy."

Hmmm. Well, you have to smile. First, the government removes all the structures which artificially attempted to create a separate, regionally accountable tier of governance (the RDAs, the Assemblies, the Regional Spatial Strategies in planning, the Government Offices) but now somebody has realised that, blow me down, it can be helpful for civil servants working on some issues to be organised around geographical areas, so a new thing gets invented.