Birmingham City Council is exploring the option of creating a Local Enterprise Partnership (LEP) to take over funding powers held by Advantage West Midlands.

The council has confirmed that a motion it passed in June last year indicated it would look to take over the Regional Development Agency’s regeneration powers.

Communities secretary Eric Pickles has also confirmed that he would be prepared to devolve powers to the LEP with the agreement of business leaders, contradicting a suggestion by business secretary Vince Cable on Friday that the RDA would retain its regional structure.

The council’s motion says the next stage of Birmingham’s regeneration would require the creation of an “autonomous enterprise area in which all public spending is under local control”.

The council suggests setting up an Economic Prosperity Board that would devolve funding from Advantage West Midlands, as well as scrapping bodies such as its ‘regeneration zone boards’ and ‘technology corridor boards’.

It says this would allow its ‘economic prosperity board’ to become a single economic regeneration vehicle and “remove the unnecessary plethora of organisations which
currently operate at the local, sub regional and regional levels”.

On Friday, Cable announced that “big cuts” were due for southern RDAs, which are due to slash project funding by £270m in the current financial year.

The national  RDA secretariat, led by the South West RDA, is currently in discussions with the Department for Business, Innovation, and Skills over which projects to cut. Announcements are expected from individual RDAs within two weeks.

A spokesperson for Birmingham City Council: “We want to take some time to work with our partners to fully consider the Government’s thinking before taking any decisions on the way forward.”

Sir Roy McNulty, chairman of Advantage West Midlands, said: “Obviously the concept of forming LEPs has arisen during the pre- and post election debates nationally. However we have not had any formal discussion with, or notification from, any of our local partners about their intentions.

“In this region we do have the recently formed West Midlands’ Joint Strategy and Investment Board (JS&IB), which is made up of representatives of the West Midlands Leaders Board, the Board of Advantage West Midlands and of business. Birmingham City Council is represented on this.

“It has agreed that the core building blocks for future economic development within the region should be six sub-regions, or combinations thereof, with some economic development, co-ordination and expertise retained at regional level. These concepts could be harmonised with an LEP structure.

“We are encouraged by recent comments from both Business Secretary Vince Cable and regional business organisations acknowledging our considerable impact on, and support of, the region’s economy in the past ten years.”

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