West Midlands NO! Campaign

During the Tory Party conference in Birmingham the other weekend, David Cameron said that he would abolish Regional Devlopment Agencies if they win the next election.

The Tories see great savings in getting rid of these unelected quangos, something we understandably agree with.  There isn’t much meat on the bones of the Tories’ plan to get rid of the RDAs and their constitutional reforms are often watered down by the time they get turned into a coherent policy but we can live in hope.

So where is the saving in getting rid of RDAs?  Quite simply, they are an unnecessary duplication.  Their job is to drive regeneration and attract outside investment but that’s the job of lots of other organisations, including local authorities.

Your local authority will employ people to attract new businesses into their areas, create jobs and spend regeneration money.  They will probably have set up a quango of their own, like Telford First or the Wolverhampton Developent Company, which will do the same.  There will be a number of regeneration partnerships covering the local authority area involving parish and town councils.  Then there are the countless regional quangos which are also doing the same job.

All of these quangos cost money and it’s the taxpayer that foots the bill.  Advantage West Midlands has a budget of £300m per year in addition to the income it gets from “investments” it has made using taxpayers money.  The pot of money available for regeneration is the same size but there are more quangos dipping into it and every one of them spends a proportion of that money on wages, buildings, expenses and propaganda.  The more quangos set up for regeneration, the less regeneration money actually gets spent on regeneration.

There’s no denying that Advantage West Midlands is responsible for some success stories and the BBC Politics Show piece today (which, as naysayer says, was more like an infomercial than a documentary) pointed out some examples of how taxpayers money has been used to improve peoples’ lives.  But none of them were examples of regional working and certainly nothing that couldn’t be done by a local authority with the same access to regeneration cash that Advantage West Midlands has.  To be honest, with access to a few million pounds of taxpayers money and little or no outside interference in how you spend it, it would be hard for anyone to fail to achieve even moderate success.

Driving regeneration and attracting inward investment is something that is better done at a local level by local people with local priorities. There are very few areas where a regional approach is better than a local one. MG Rover abandoning Longbridge affected a large area but did it require a regional response? Did Stoke and Stafford feel the pinch? Did Oswestry and Shrewsbury need to build an extension on their Job Centres to cope with aninflux of jobseekers? No, Longbridge was a sub-regional problem and needed a sub-regional response but it’s all or nothing with Advantage West Midlands - their £300m is for the whole euroregion and they can spend as much or as little in a particular area as they want. Advantage West Midlands spent a small fortune on Longbridge and the rest of the West Midlands missed out.

Abolishing Advantage West Midlands and giving their money and responsibilities back to elected local councils, where it was taken from in the first place, will not only save money but it will increase democratic accountability and spread regeneration money around the country much more fairly. Whether the Tories stand by their pledge or not is another matter entirely.