Boston needs to stake early claim in agency shake-up

We wonder what impact the coalition government’s decision to scrap its nine development agencies will have on Boston when EMDA - the East Midlands Development Agency ceases to exist.
More details on the axing of the agencies will be published later in the year, but in the meantime
communities secretary Eric Pickles and business secretary Vince Cable have sai they are keen to encourage local businesses and councils to work together to develop proposals for local enterprise partnerships - LEPs - and want to rebalance the economy towards the private sector.
Interestingly, given the perceived bias of EMDA towards Nottinghamshire, Leicestershire and Derbyshire rather than Lincolnshire, the letter notes that “some local and regional boundaries do not reflect functional economic areas. We wish to enable partnerships to better reflect the natural economic geography of the areas they serve and hence to cover real functional economic and travel to work areas.”
Other key points are:

• “Partnerships will want to create the right environment for business and growth in their areas, by tackling issues such as planning and housing, local transport and infrastructure priorities, employment and enterprise and the transition to the low carbon economy. Supporting small business start-ups will therefore be important. They will want to work closely with universities and further education colleges, and with other relevant stakeholders. In some areas, tourism will also be an important economic driver."“To be effective partnerships, it is vital that business and civic leaders work together. We believe this would normally mean an equal representation on the boards of these partnerships and that a prominent business leader should chair the board.”
• “To be sufficiently strategic, we would expect that partnerships would include groups of upper tier authorities. If it is clearly the wish of business and civic leaders to establish a local enterprise partnership for a functional economic area that matches existing regional boundaries, we will not object.”
• “Government is keen to work closely with and through capable local enterprise partnerships which meet these criteria.”
• “We would therefore welcome outline proposals from partnerships of local authorities and businesses, reflecting the Coalition Government's agenda, as soon as possible, and no later than 6 September.”

Clearly Boston seems unlikely to have much of a voice in all of this, but we need to make our presence felt at this early stage in the game to ensure that we are not as so often happens pushed to the bottom of the list.

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