Category Local Enterprise Partnerships
What is happening with Greater Birmingham’s Economy
The recent publicity around the growth of the Greater Birmingham and Solihull – being the LEP with the highest GVA growth almost got me to write a post about the underlying reasons for its growth – (it is in draft but will it surface?) but I was diverted when I received an email from the […]
Growth Deals – Some Analysis
This is a quick and dirty look at the growth deals – including total figures for the full period up to 2021 and per capita awards. (These latter figures do not take account the issue of overlapping LEP areas.) Looking at the per capita LGF awards it is clear there is varying […]
European Funding in the West Midlands 2014-20
I thought it was worth sharing my presentation to the West Midlands Economic Forum’s event on ‘Financial Flows’. My presentation was on European Funding in the West Midlands. After all the doom and gloom it turns out when you add the figures up the initial allocations to the region are 18% higher that in the […]
Greater Birmingham: The Name is not the main Game
In the wake of Evan Davies’s series ‘Mind the Gap‘ on London and its pre-eminence in the UK there has been much debate in Birmingham about the city particularly when yet again a poll carried out for the TV programme found that Manchester was viewed by many in the UK as the second city. There […]
Smart Specialisation in England; is this really LEPland?
As many of you may be aware ‘England’ is drawing up a smart specialisation strategy (S3) to fulfill the ex ante conditionality required for an England ERDF Operational programme. i.e. it is developing a national strategy to focus innovation investment under the ERDF programme as it has to under ERDF regulations. This is a tall […]
Cities, Structural Funds and Smart Specialisation- What is the emerging picture
I want to look at the emerging role of cities in the new EU structural funds in a forthcoming blog post and wondered if there was feedback/ or anyone had information/sources on 1) Proposed Delegations down to Cities under the ITI initiative 2) Whether the 5% figure for Sustainable Urban Development is a minimum or […]
Birmingham’s Carbon Road Map – launched – Well done Birmingham City Council
I haven’t got time to do a full review, but as it is a very important document for the City and it has come out today I have literally skim read it. (Download it here) It does look very promising. Whilst it is good to look at, ie up to coffee table standard it is […]
Smart Specialisation Event
Just a short post. This event being held in Belfast looks like a very interesting one day conference on smart specialisation. It might be a good place for LEPs aspiring to major on innovation to attend https://uksmartspecialisationconferenceni.eventbrite.co.uk/
What is Smart Specialisation when it is at home?
Many LEPs across the country are waking up to this new European term as with the responsibility being given them to spend EU structural funds from 2014-2020 comes a new approach to targetting resources to be spent on innovation. The term Smart Specialisation is an approach to developing Regional Innovation Strategies which whilst not compulsory […]
What Difference could a Proper City Region Make to Greater Birmingham today
No sooner than I had posted my post on the City Region than I noticed a twitter quote from Mike Emmerich from Manchester New Economy (MNE) saying that Local Authorities will need to work much closer together in the future and Local Authority boundaries are irrelevant. That comes from one of the key people at […]
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