LEP watch

The Government plans to replace regional development agencies with new local enterprise partnerships (LEPs) - described in the coalition agreement as "joint local authority-business bodies brought forward by local authorities themselves to promote economic development". In June, business secretary Vince Cable and communities secretary Eric Pickles (pictured) wrote to town halls inviting them to submit outline LEP proposals by "no later than 6 September".

We've trawled the web to bring you this week's news on how plans to set up LEP are progressing around the country.

29 July

Black Country local authorities have refused to join up with Birmingham to set up a powerful regional LEP, according to the Birmingham Post. The newspaper says that Birmingham City Council had been attempting to persuade Sandwell, Dudley, Walsall and Wolverhampton councils to join forces with it to create an LEP. But Black Country leaders have said they would rather go it alone, according to the newspaper.

Cornwall Council's chief executive Kevin Lavery has outlined plans for a Cornwall and Isles of Scilly LEP, reports Business Cornwall. The piece says that there is little appetite for a joint Devon and Cornwall LEP.

28 July

Initial discussions have been held about creating a Norfolk-based LEP, reports the Eastern Daily Press. Ann Steward, cabinet member for sustainable development at Norfolk County Council, told the newspaper: "Councils in Norfolk have already met and agreed to take forward for further consideration the possibility of a Norfolk-based LEP, while recognising that in doing so there will be a need to accommodate and address local concerns."

Councils in Nottinghamshire, Derbyshire and East Staffordshire are to discuss plans to set up an LEP to replace the East Midlands Development Agency, reports the BBC website.

26 July

A consortium from the Tees Valley will submit a bid to create one of the first LEPs, reports the Northern Echo. It says that Tees Valley Unlimited, which comprises five local authorities - Darlington, Hartlepool, Stockton, Middlesbrough and Redcar and Cleveland - wants to take over functions including planning, housing, local transport and infrastructure.

Look out for our next installment of LEP watch this time next week.

Poll: Is it time to move beyond the Asbo?

In a speech today, home secretary Theresa May signalled a possible end to the use of Antisocial Behaviour Orders (Asbos) in England and Wales. According to figures published today, nearly 17,000 Antisocial Behaviour Orders (Asbos) were issued between 1999 and 2008. But May said that a "complete change of emphasis was now needed". "It's time to move beyond the Asbo," she said.

May's alternative - predictably - has Big Society stamped all over it. She said: "We want communities to come up with their own ideas of what they are going to do. It's not just the police, it's not just social landlords, or councils - it's the whole of society that needs to come together and work together to tackle antisocial behaviour."

As an aside, one criticism of Asbos made in May's speech is that more than 50 per cent of the orders have been breached. This may indeed show that Asbos are not an effective deterrent. But if those breaching the Asbos end up behind bars and stop committing antisocial behaviour as a result, this probably does not matter to those whose lives are blighted by such nuisance behaviour.

Is the home secretary right to signal the end to the use of Asbos? Let us know by voting in our new poll (top right), or by commenting below.

Blog debate: The end of an era for URCs?

They say bad news comes in threes. Yesterday this rule seemed to be borne out when it emerged that the regional government offices are to be abolished, the Sustainable Development Commission is to have its Defra funding withdrawn, and Wolverhampton's urban regeneration company, the Wolverhampton Development Company, is to close.

The URC said that two of its funders - regional development agency Advantage West Midlands and Wolverhampton City Council - could not guarantee funding beyond March 2011. The URC's chief executive Stephen Catchpole told Regeneration & Renewal yesterday that the URC, which employs four people, could close as early as this September.

News of the Wolverhampton URC's demise follows comments earlier this month by Sir Bob Kerslake, chief executive of housing and regeneration quango the Homes & Communities Agency, that the quango's future funding of URC's is "an area up for review". Along with local authorities and RDAs, the HCA is a key funder of URCs, but Kerslake said that the HCA could now "reduce its involvement" in this area. The quango will review its involvement in a range of different local delivery vehicles, including URCs, on a case-by-case basis, Kerslake said.

For URCs, news that the HCA could reduce its funding for URCs is worrying enough. But this possible reduction in HCA involvement will happen as local authority budgets are squeezed in the next spending review period and as the RDAs are wound down. In particular, it seems unlikely that the RDAs, which have been told by the Government to reduce the scale of their spending commitments by two-fifths in 2011/12 and further still in future financial years, will renew their funding for URCs post March 2011. With funding from the three sources likely to be much harder to access in the next financial year prospects for URCs look pretty bleak.

UPDATE 26 July 2010 Walsall's URC, Walsall Regeneration Company, has also announced it is to close following a decision by Advantage West Midlands that it can no longer provide funding. At a board meeting on 22 July, the URC's board came to the conclusion that it was unable to continue. WRC chair Brian Lowe said: "Unfortunately, the significant cuts in funding by one of our funding partners meant the company was unable to proceed as a going concern."

We'd like your views on the following two points:

• Does the need for URCs remain?
• In the absence of URCs, how can regeneration best be driven in England's towns and cities?

Let us know your views by commenting below or emailing jamie.carpenter@haymarket.com

Poll: Was the Government right to list Milton Keynes' 1970s shopping centre?

Tourism and heritage minister John Penrose last week announced that thecentre:mk shopping centre in Milton Keynes will be made a Grade II listed building. A letter from Penrose to the owners of the 1970s centre (picture above courtesy of Martin Pettitt), who have fought against the listing, said: "The secretary of state [Jeremy Hunt] is persuaded by the advice from English Heritage and others that the MK building possesses high-quality finishes and materials throughout (which is unusual for this type of building), with a high quality of design and unusual roof-top service area access, which all contribute to the building's architectural interest."

The DCMS's decision has been criticised by the owners. Jon Weymouth, representing the owners, Hermes Property Asset Management and PRUPIM, said: "We are disappointed with the decision taken by the DCMS to list the property. Our concerns that this decision will impact upon the future evolution and growth of thecentre:mk and Central Milton Keynes remain. Both owners will clearly need time to study the decision and its implications."

Read on for a selection of further comments on the announcement:

Elizabeth Hinde, head of property, British Retail Consortium: "This sets a bad precedent. This shopping centre is not a building of significant national interest or under threat of demolition. Listing thecentre:mk will make it more expensive to adapt to changing consumer needs. Grade II status will also make it less attractive for retailers to locate there, which will undermine local job creation."

Jon Wright, 20th Century Society: "I am absolutely thrilled, I really never thought I'd see this day. This really flags the building up as the heart of Milton Keynes, and a building of international importance. I hope now the owners will wear the listing as a badge of pride."

Telegraph blogger Harry Mount: "thecentre:mk is bloody horrible – same old soulless collection of retail boxes piled alongside and on top of each other. But then the whole of Milton Keynes looks like that ... it spoils nobody’s view, because the view is the same in every direction – of unrelenting steel and glass. Anyone who lives there has chosen to live there – and presumably likes the steel and glass look. No one is offended; and Milton Keynes certainly has interest, if not beauty, as a planned new 20th century town. I can see why the shopping centre has been listed."

What do you think? Let us know by commenting below or voting in our poll (top left).

Pop(-up) Art

Regeneration photographer Len Grant is busy working on his latest project - a collection of photos of people from around Manchester, with poems written alongside them by US poet Linda Chase, a tutor at the Poetry School in Manchester.

Grant's last project was Billy and Rolonde, a book featuring portraits of socially excluded individuals in Manchester, which we reviewed in April. Before this, he compiled images tracking the regeneration of east Manchester, in Reclaiming East Manchester - reviewed in the same month. His latest project, Shooting the Breeze, is scheduled to be completed in time for the Didsbury Arts Festival in October. It entails him - along with Chase - driving round to various Manchester neighbourhoods and setting up a "pop-up studio". There, Grant and Chase stop passers-by, who pose in front of the "studio" - little more than a white backdrop - and tell the two artists a little about their life story. Grant takes a portrait of the passers-by; Chase writes a poem inspired by them.

Grant said: "I've always fancied driving round Manchester and just putting up my equipment wherever I feel like it and capturing people as they go about their daily life. Once people understood exactly why there appeared to be a huge piece of white tarpaulin in the middle of their street, they were really keen to get involved and I sensed a lot of pride in them that we'd taken an interest in them and where they lived."

He added that the locations of the shots were not of huge importance. But can it be a coincidence that for this project - what is essentially a social project - he picked deprived neighbourhoods, including housing estates in Cheetham Hill, Wythenshawe and Gorton - where a New Deal for Communities (NDC) regeneration partnership has been operating for the past ten years.

The text of one of Chase's poems from the project is below.

Man and Son
Gabriel with Caiden

Gabriel is a man of names
who loves his only son.

He has Dad and Cameron
curled around a gun

and Logan lettered
right above his heart

as Calvin Klein enpouches
every private part.

But his son Caiden
is label free, anonymous

though there’s no doubt who’s
precious son he is.

Long live tattoos, bare chests
and this fine dad--

he might be the coolest
any kid has ever had.

LEPs: the story so far

Colin Marrs uncovers the progress being made by local authorities towards the formation of LEPs.

Having decided to scrap regional development agencies, the coalition government has decided to allow local authorities, in partnership with business, to promote economic development through a new model – the local enterprise partnership.

In a joint letter sent last month to local authorities, business secretary Vince Cable (pictured) and communities secretary Eric Pickles said the new bodies would be made up from partnerships of upper-tier authorities and be responsible for business support and enterprise, as well as planning, housing and transport (Confusingly, lower-tier authorities hold many of the powers in the latter three areas).

Below we answer some questions about the progress being made by local authorities towards the formation of LEPs.

1) How has the invitation to form LEPs been received, and what steps have been taken by people in different parts of the country towards forming LEPs?

The lure of extra new powers and influence, if not funding, for LEPs means that many county councils are taking the bull by the horns. Many councils said they are already actively engaged in discussions with potential partner councils in anticipation.

Councils in the North of England have largely taken a joined-up approach within their regions. For instance, all council leaders in the Yorkshire and Humber region sat down together before announcing their planned LEP arrangements, and have called for the retention of some form of regional coordination, they said. However, in the South-East, where the region is perhaps more of an artificial construct, the picture is more bottom-up. Councils around London said they are still unsure if they will be able to join with councils in the capital to form LEPs.

2) The Government's letter says that it expects the new partnerships to be formed by upper-tier authorities. What does this mean for alliances between lower-tier authorities?

The Government has indicated that it sees existing partnerships, such as multi-area agreements and city-regions as “low hanging fruit”. You can expect most MAAs to simply rebadge themselves as LEPs. However, a number of MAAs are made up from districts or groupings including only one upper-tier authority. Blackpool Borough Council said it is keen on converting the economic development company it has formed with neighbouring Wyre and Fylde councils into a LEP, but none is an upper-tier authority. The planned Lancashire Pennine LEP contains just one upper-tier authority, the county council. Some counties, such as Cumbria and Cornwall, said they would be happy to go it alone. It remains to be seen how dogmatic the Government will be about insisting that every LEP must include at least two upper-tier authorities.

3) Are the likely boundaries of some LEPs already becoming clear?

In most areas of the country, a rough jigsaw of LEP partnerships is starting to emerge. Many areas wishing to join together are providing joint responses to the government consultation. The only regions where there is a lack of clarity on the potential LEP areas are the South-East, East of England and London.

4) Will any sort of regional economic development mechanisms remain?

In many parts of the country, there certainly seems to be an appetite for the retention of some form of regional coordination to remain in place to avoid competing LEPs undermining each others’ efforts to attract investment. According to experts, some councils have expressed fears of a Darwinist LEP landscape where the fittest survive and the weaker LEPs lag behind. Others point out that distributing European funding on a non-regional basis would require years of negotiation (and possibly confrontation) with the European Union.

5) Will the LEPs acquire RDA assets?

The chairman of the Partnership for Urban South Hampshire MAA, which said it wants to become a LEP, is bullishly lobbying to take on land assets currently owned by the South-East England Development Agency. The Government has not given any indication as to whether it, and other LEPs, will be allowed to do so. Holding land, in addition to planning powers, would make the LEPs powerful regeneration vehicles. However, many are skeptical that the Government will allow this option, and many fear they will attempt a firesale of RDA land assets on the open market to raise money. This would seriously hamper efforts to meet regeneration goals through the sites’ redevelopment.

Below is a list, gathered from experts in each region, of local authorities that are in discussion over forming a LEP. This is not an attempt to provide a definitive list. We welcome comments from readers on potential LEPs.

Yorkshire & Humber
North Yorkshire
East Yorkshire
South Yorkshire (Sheffield city-region)
West Yorkshire (Leeds city-region)

West Midlands
Birmingham
Black Country
Coventry, Solihull Warwickshire

Worcestershire
Staffordshire, Stoke-on-Trent
Shropshire, Hereford and Telford & Wrekin

East Midlands
Northamptonshire is talking to Warwickshire and Milton Keynes
Leicestershire and Leicestershire (currently an MAA)
Lincolnshire, North Lincolnshire, North East Lincolnshire
Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire (also talking to Staffordshire)
Rutland; having gained independence from Leicestershire, the county could be lukewarm about re-entering another form of union. One wag suggests that the tiny county might partner with Norway.
Some districts in north Derbyshire have expressed a desire to join the Sheffield city-region.

North-West
Greater Manchester (Manchester city-region)
Merseyside
Cumbria
Merseyside
Cheshire, Warrington
District councils within the existing Pennine Lancashire MAA may decide to form a LEP - if permitted by central government. Correction: Rachael Farricker of Regenerate Pennine Lancashire points out that Pennine Lancashire has two upper-tier local authorities; in addition to Lancashire County Council, Blackburn with Darwen is a unitary authority.
Blackpool, Fylde and Wyre Councils want to convert their economic development company to a LEP, but none is an upper-tier authority

North-East
This region was the most keen to retain its regional development agency, One North-East. It could still plump for an LEP covering the whole region, but Tees Valley may decide to go it alone.

This could result in the following LEPs:
Tyne and Wear
Tees Valley
Durham and Northumberland would join up with each other, or one of the others

South-West
Bristol/West England – four unitaries (Bristol, Bath & North East Somerset, North Somerset, South Gloucestershire)
Bournemouth, Poole and Dorset (currently an MAA)
Cornwall and Devon – in talks after Cornwall originally wanted to go it alone but realised this might not be acceptable to central government.
Gloucestershire – appears to want to join with a LEP involving authorities currently in the West Midlands, but has talked to Swindon
Swindon and Wiltshire
Somerset – little progress appears to be made so far

London

Here the situation is different to the rest of the country because the London mayor already possesses wide-ranging regeneration powers. The mayor’s office is considering allowing some authorities to join LEPs. The mayor’s planning adviser Simon Milton met with the Thames Gateway London Partnership to discuss the possibility of east London boroughs joining a LEP also comprising Kent and Essex, councils in the Thames Gateway region.

There have also been suggestions that the existing Olympics MAA area could convert into a LEP.

South-East


Partnership of Urban South Hampshire – currently an MAA and is in talks with the Isle of Wight
Hastings and Brighton are in talks.

East of England

Little progress appears to be made so far, but there are suggestions that delivery vehicle Cambridgeshire Horizons could take on LEP status.

If you have any more information about potential LEPs, please email regeneration@haymarket.com

Podcast: Listen to Colin Marrs discuss local enterprise partnerships in the latest Ten Minute Briefing

Big Issue: Browse our continually updated archive of news on LEPs

National Regeneration Summit latest

Keep up to date with the Tweetwall below for all the latest news and comment from our annual National Regeneration Summit, which takes place today and will be headlined by housing and regeneration minister Grant Shapps.

The theme of this year's summit is Sustaining Regeneration in an Era of Spending Restraint. Already deputy mayor of London Sir Simon Milton (pictured right) and Homes & Communities chief Sir Bob Kerslake have addressed the summit.

Regeneration & Renewal's team of reporters will be at the event, which takes place in Islington, north London, to bring you the latest news, quips and missives.

If you're at the event, don't forget to include the hashtag #regennational10 so that your tweets can appear in the Tweetwall below. We look forward to hearing your thoughts and interacting with your comments from the event. (View the Tweetwall in a wider format here.)

Keep an eye on our Flickr too, where we will be regularly uploading photos from the event.

Book review: Rebuilding Manchester

You could have bought the two-up, two-down terrace in Moss Side I lived in with three student friends between 1998-99 for £20,000, give or take. The sky blue hulk of Maine Road, home of Manchester City FC – then managed by Joe Royle and soon to suffer the ignominy of being relegated to the third tier of English football – loomed two streets away. I paid £40 a week in rent, and always on time, too – rumour had it that our landlord “Pete” went to bed with a handgun under his pillow.

These days, Man City are back in the Premier League, and owned by men so rich that last month they didn’t blink at signing an Ivory Coast international for £24 million on a reported weekly wage of £220,000 a week. The club has moved on geographically too, to the east of the city centre, in a new stadium originally planned for Manchester’s (failed) 2000 bid to host the Olympic Games.

That Manchester had the gall to the bid for the Games just four years after an IRA bomb tore the heart out of the city centre says much about the ingenuity and spirit of its people, and only two years on the city was hosting the Commonwealth Games. It’s that spirit that town planner Euan Kellie – also a student in the city in the late nineties – pays tribute to in “Rebuilding Manchester.”

Kellie’s book is the story of the regeneration of a post-industrial city economy. The IRA strike on 15 June 1996 that injured 120 people was not the first attack on the city, of course – more than five decades earlier the Luftwaffe had also wrought havoc. As Kellie notes, the terrorist attack gave the city the opportunity to “rectify the hasty mistakes of postwar development.” Michael Heseltine visited and declared the situation as “an opportunity, perhaps unique, to rebuild and recreate the centre of one of England’s great cities.”

More specifically, it provided the chance to recreate the Hulme regeneration model on a wider, city-centre scale. In Hulme, Manchester City Council had set up an independent company with a blend of private and public experience to transform an area of concrete desk access council flats into mixed-use, mixed-use tenure neighbourhoods under the Government’s City Challenge programme. A total of £250 million was spent between 1992-97. Then deputy chief executive of Manchester City Council Howard Bernstein said: “Over the past ten years, we’ve seen housing-led strategies, employment-led strategies and transport-led strategies. We’ve tried to produce regeneration-based strategies that incorporate all of those.”

Kellie writes that Manchester built on this holistic approach to expand the city-core in the wake of the IRA bomb. A taskforce was promptly set up comprised of public and private partners and, after a masterplan was chosen, the council bravely committed to determining all planning applications within a period of eight (EIGHT!) weeks.

Kellie divides the post-bomb masterplan process into five sections – commercial, residential, historic, retail, leisure and space and connectivity. The emphasis is on physical schemes – don’t expect to read anything here on the implications of Mancunians rejecting the congestion charge, or how the combined authority clout that city-region status brings could impact on regeneration. Throughout, it is the partnership approach that allows the city to reinvent itself. As Kellie notes, the rebuilding is more about bricks and mortar; it is about people. If “Rebuilding Manchester” has a weakness, it is that there are few insights into the characters – the Leeses and the Bernsteins, the Tony Wilsons and Tom Bloxhams - that made the rebuilding possible. Readers looking for observations on what it is that defines the Mancunian spirit will be disappointed. Kellie is a town planner, not a social anthropologist, after all.

Nonetheless, “Rebuilding Manchester” is required reading for anyone with an interest in place-making in post-industrial cities. The exciting thing is that the end of the story remains unwritten. As Manchester City Council chief executive Sir Howard Bernstein writes in the forward. “It is a great … and never-ending story."

Community roots in empty spaces

“It’s unusual to find land like this in central London,” says Heather Ring, designer of the Union Street Urban Orchard. “It’s a vast site, filled with sunlight and overgrown with buddleia [a plant in the figwort family, if you must know], a habitat for birds and a home for bees.”

Ring created the temporary orchard, built on privately-held disused land not too far from the Tate Modern in Bankside, in just 28 days with the help of the local community and volunteers from further afield. Her aim was to create a place to meet for local residents and visitors to the London Festival of Architecture, for which the orchard was created.

While LFA ended last weekend, the orchard will occupy its current spot - opposite a housing estate and beside railway arches - until 19 September, or for the duration of “one fruit harvest”, as Ring puts it.

After that, the fruit trees will scatter around various estates and allotments in Bankside and the site will be turned – eventually - into a budget hotel, according to the orchard’s organisers.

It’s not the first time that the site has been turned into something temporary. For the 2008 LFA, a French architecture group transformed the site into a lido. (Watch a video here.) Ring herself describes the orchard as an “event-based” landscape. Whatever it’s called, it can only be good thing that local people are coming up with innovative solutions to fill empty spaces, albeit temporarily, whether it’s on the site of building projects mothballed by the recession or not.

Click here to watch a slideshow of images.

Eric Pickles' LGA speech as a Wordle

We've created a wordle of a draft of communities secretary Eric Pickles' speech (sample quote: "We can make localism a reality") from yesterday's Local Government Association Conference 2010 in Bournemouth.

Click on the image above to make it larger.

Powered by wordle.net

The RDAs have their say on impact of £270m cuts

As part of the £6.25 billion of cuts set out by the Treasury in May, the eight regional development agencies outside London were told to save £270 million in the current financial year, by ending "lower value spending".

Altogether, the cuts amount to nearly 20 per cent of the RDAs’ combined budget of just over £1.4 billion in 2010/11.

Yorkshire and Humber correspondent Peter Baber contacted the RDAs to find out what regeneration schemes might be affected.

One North-East
Cut: £32.9m (15%)

A spokesman said the agency “have been afforded some financial protection this year”, but would still find cuts of nearly £33 million “challenging”. “We are not sure yet where the axe is going to fall,” he said. “We have already committed significant levels of investment this year, and will have to talk with our partners about what to cut.”

Yorkshire Forward
Cut: £40.3m (18.8%)

The announced cut for Yorkshire Forward is actually nearly £4 million less than it was expecting. Outgoing Yorkshire Forward chairman Terry Hodgkinson said the cuts would involve “both delaying work, and stopping some schemes and initiatives altogether”. “In some cases, where funds have already been committed, we will need to investigate existing contractual commitments,” he said. “We will look to minimise the impact on our partners.”

A spokesperson confirmed that a leaked memo seen by a local news website was in essence what the RDA thought it could cut when it had assumed its overall cuts would be £44 million. She said these no longer applied because they now had to cut less.

The leaked memo suggested cuts or deferments to a wide range of regeneration projects, including: £2.4 million going from the Tower Works development in Holbeck in Leeds; £1.2 million going from a scheme designed to link Barnsley town centre to the new Gateway Plaza; just under £1 million going from the Rotherham Central regeneration scheme, and £1.3 million going from Bradford City Park – a project that has been in gestation for most of the past decade.

It also suggested that the planned £40,000 feasibility study for the York Central regeneration scheme should be scrapped. And it planned to cut £100,000 from each of the annual budgets of Marketing Leeds, an agency which is meant to promote the city outside the region, and Financial Leeds, an agency supporting the city region’s financial services.

Tourism body Welcome to Yorkshire would have its budget cut by £750,000, and its plan to sponsor the Clipper round the world yacht race for £50,000 would be scrapped.

North-West Regional Development Agency
Cut: £52m (18.1%)

The cut of £52 million is nearly double what the agency had been expecting, even with the extra protection promised for the northern RDAs.

A spokesperson said it was too early to say exactly what would be cut. “We could know as early as next week,” she said, “but need to discuss this with our partners.”

One victim of the planned cuts looks likely to be Liverpool Vision, the city’s economic development company. It had already been facing a planned reduction in its budget for this year from £18.25m to £13.5m, but now says as a result of the larger than expected cuts overall it could be facing even more stringency.

However, outgoing Liverpool Vision chief executive Jim Gill said said he believed most projects were safe because they came with funding already legally committed.

Advantage West Midlands
Cut: £37.1m (18.6%)

Advantage West Midlands is adamant that its Birmingham Gateway project – a plan to transform Birmingham New Street station (shoppers in New Street pictured above) and its immediate surroundings – will not be the victim of any cuts after it was singled out as a project that needed completing in chancellor George Osborne’s budget speech.

As for everything else, a spokesperson said: “We still need to discuss the cuts with our partners, because all our projects are with partners, and many of them are also facing separate cuts. We plan to have the cuts finalised by the Comprehensive Spending Review in October.”

She added: “We are also trying to seek clarification on whether the decision on what to cut is just down to us, or whether we have to make suggestions to central government, because if regional development agencies are being abolished, then they could be taking over responsibility.”

East Midlands Development Agency
Cut: £28.3m (22.7%)

The East Midlands stands in direct contrast to Yorkshire and the Humber. Whereas its northern neighbour has had a “reprieve” of nearly £4 million from the cuts it was expecting, the £28.3 million EMDA is being asked to cut is almost exactly the same amount more than the £24 million it was expecting.

A spokesman said it was too early to say where the cuts would go, and dismissed talk in local media about the Nottingham Waterside and Leicester Science Park projects being threatened as “pure speculation”.

East of England Development Agency
Cut: £23.3m (22.9%)

“We can’t say at the moment where the cuts will go because we need to talk to our partners first,” a spokesman from the East of England agency said. “We will know in the next two weeks.”

He added that the £23.3m cut was “slightly higher than we were expecting”.

South-East England Development Agency
Cut: £23.3 million (22.3%)

The South-East agency said it was “still in discussions with our partners about where the cuts will be” and “cannot even speculate about when we will be able to say”.

South-West Regional Development Agency
Cut: £27.8m (19.5%)

Swerda is acting as a “chair of chairs” in relations between the regional development agencies and central government about the cuts.

Chief executive Jane Henderson said most of the cuts would be “managed by delaying existing work or reducing some of our planned investments”. “As a point of principle, we will not unilaterally break any existing contracts,” she said.

She added that the agency still had £114 million to invest in the regional economy this year.

A spokesman would not be drawn on exactly where the cuts would go. “We still have to work with our partners,” he said, “and are not going to make a decision for several weeks.”