Hertfordshire’s Local Enterprise Partnership has the go-ahead, but, as Karen Day reports, the birth of the county’s new enterprise body is taking longer than expected
It did not come as a surprise to many that Hertfordshire was among the first tranche of successful Local Enterprise Partnership bids three months ago. On paper, the Hertfordshire LEP has all the right ingredients to please government ministers: a geographic base of more than 1m people; an eagerness to work with its neighbours; the backing of big business including retailer Tesco; and an ambitious economic vision.
The LEP, which is being managed and developed by Hertfordshire council, is still in its infancy, and progress has been slower than anticipated.
A shadow board and chairman are due to be appointed by the end of January – more than a month later than expected – a delay that is likely to mean the LEP will miss out on the first bids for the government’s Regional Growth Fund, which close on 21 January.
Business leaders in the county are keen for the LEP to move more quickly, and say the council has been overly concerned with process.
Tim Hutchings, chief executive of Hertfordshire Chamber of Commerce & Industry, says: “It certainly needs to pick up a bit. I am generally happy, but you can overdo consultation. We need to move quickly and get the right leadership in place.”
John Pryor, strategy and intelligence manager at the council, concedes that the formation of the LEP has not progressed as quickly as others around the country, with Manchester, for example, announcing the appointment of its shadow chairman in October.
Effective partnership
Pryor admits that, with regards to its potential cross-boundary co-operation with Essex and Cambridgeshire – which featured highly in Hertfordshire county’s bid – the LEP is starting with a “blank piece of paper” and is significantly behind other LEPs.
In addition, business leaders acknowledge that developing a more cohesive and effective partnership between the public and private sectors will be challenging, with both likely to favour different approaches.
“I don’t think the economy will improve without a genuine [public-private] partnership,” says Hutchings, “but the LEP has to be efficient and streamlined. We don’t want a big, expensive structure that takes us nowhere.”
Structural debates aside, the LEP will base its plan for economic development on a 12-year strategy that was launched after considerable consultation in 2009. It highlights the main barriers to its future economic growth as: the county’s overstretched infrastructure – with 25% of working residents commuting into London every day; a lack of affordable housing; and congestion.
Significantly, the plan acknowledges that, even before the recession, the county was starting to lose ground. According to the European Union, it is the fifth-largest economy in the UK outside London, and it has set the target of moving to third by 2021 – a highly ambitious aim.
The outline plan is still a very broad brush, with five key objectives, ranging from stimulating innovation to encouraging enterprise and improving skills and infrastructure. It stipulates a focus on attracting more knowledge-based businesses to the county and creating clusters for the life sciences, creative, digital and pharmaceutical industries.
These are precisely the types of businesses that several other regions around the UK aim to attract. The county has already commissioned a study to examine potential development sites and whether existing ones could be turned into “strategic” business parks to house the clusters, to make Hertfordshire a more attractive location for such occupiers.
“There needs to be a much more focused approach to strategic employment sites,” says Nigel Palmer, head of Lambert Smith Hampton’s St Albans office and one of the LEP’s private sector supporters.
“We have pockets of sites at Hatfield Business Park, Hemel Hempstead, Watford and a new science park in Stevenage, but we do need to give the private sector much more hand-holding,” he adds.
According to internal papers from the council, it wants to attract direct foreign investment, and intends to bring forward a number of sites for development over the next few years. The study is due to be published in February.
The LEP is also expected to take a key role in overseeing housing growth across Hertfordshire, and as part of its low-carbon objective, it is likely to set rules for sustainable development.
However, setting an actual building target will be contentious, with the previous spatial plan target of 15,800 homes by 2031 due to swallow swathes of green belt land. the lack of brownfield land.
Palmer expects LSH to offer its input into any discussion on housing growth. “It’s one of the reasons that we are a supporter,” he says.
“The private sector can give a degree of realism about the market.”
Private sector supporters of the LEP still talk about its potential and the opportunities ahead, but, as time ticks by, they are keen to see signs that its promise will be fulfilled.
Potential structure of the LEP
Board of 10-12, chaired by private sector representative.
Four programme boards chaired by a main board member:
? Enterprise & innovation (overseeing the development of clusters)
? Employment & skills
? Strategic infrastructure
? Inward investment
Key backers of the LEP include:
? Tesco – with 10,000 employees in the county, the supermarket giant says that it is “keen to see what its involvement will be”
? Lambert Smith Hampton (already holds several contracts with Hertfordshire council)
? T-Mobile UK
? Warner Brothers
? GlaxoSmithKline
? 11 local authorities
