The Government’s overarching goal is to promote strong, sustainable and balanced growth. We need to rebalance the economy both sectorally and geographically, so that growth is not reliant on particular places. For local communities this means ensuring everyone has access to opportunities that growth brings and everyone is able to fulfil their potential.
On 28 October 2010 the Government published the Local Growth White Paper, which sets out a new approach to sub-national growth including more information about Local Enterprise Partnerships and the Regional Growth Fund.
Local Enterprise Partnerships
The secretaries of state for BIS (Vince Cable) and CLG (Eric Pickles) wrote to leaders of local authorities and leaders of business on 29 June 2010, inviting them to work with the Government to help strengthen local economies.
More than 60 expressions of interest were received and on 28 October 2010, 24 Local Enterprise Partnerships were given the go ahead to take their proposals to the next stage and form governance boards.
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The following 33 Local Enterprise Partnerships have progressed to the next stage and been invited to set up their Boards for recognition by government ministers.
- Birmingham and Solihull with East Staffordshire, Lichfield and Tamworth
- Black Country
- Cheshire and Warrington
- Coast to Capital
- Cornwall and Isles of Scilly
- Coventry and Warwickshire
- Cumbria
- Derby Derbyshire Nottingham and Nottinghamshire
- Enterprise M3
- Greater Cambridge and Greater Peterborough
- Greater Manchester
- Heart of the South West
- Hertfordshire
- Kent, Greater Essex and East Sussex
- Lancashire
- Leeds City Region
- Leicester and Leicestershire
- Lincolnshire
- Liverpool City Region
- London
- The Marches – Shropshire and Herefordshire
- New Anglia
- North Eastern
- Oxford City Region
- Sheffield City Region
- Solent
- South East Midlands
- Stoke and Staffordshire
- Tees Valley
- Thames Valley Berkshire
- West of England
- Worcestershire
- York and North Yorkshire
Government Offices
The Government is committed to localism and decentralisation, including rolling back unnecessary and undemocratic regional government.
As part of that, the Government closed the Government Office for London on 1 September 2010 and announced its intention on 22 July 2010 to abolish the remaining eight government offices, subject to the satisfactory resolution of consequential issues through the Spending Review. These issues were addressed as part of the Spending Review and in his statement, the Chancellor of the Exchequer confirmed the closure of the remaining government offices. This will take place by no later than 31 March 2011.