Rarely a day goes by without news of a new local enterprise partnership (LEP) being announced. To date most of the focus has been on how the regions are going to be divvied up with particular interest in the future of the northeast and the southwest English regions.

But what happens if the place where you live has little in common with the wider area? Perhaps your local economy is more similar to a place hundreds of miles away than to the next urban area. These geographical anomalies have led to suggestions that in some circumstances it might be more appropriate to base LEPs on themes rather than geography.

According to the website Insider, Somerset council has talked to local authorities in Cumbria and Suffolk about the possibility of creating a "thematic" LEP focused on the two areas’ shared reliance on the nuclear industry.

Local authorities and businesses have already been encouraged to think beyond traditional county boundaries by central government. And Somerset Council says there are no barriers to the idea of ‘thematic’ LEPs focusing on strategic issues.

Meanwhile, the Development Trusts Association’s Jess Steele has floated the idea of a Seaside Enterprise Partnership. She has already told the communities and local government select committee that seaside strategy should not be left to a regional development agency. Her argument is that a place like Hastings has very different economies from a town like Lewes and as LEPs form, she recommends an approach focused on seaside towns in need of financial help.

However, locational issues may prove to be a stumbling block for the nuclear themed LEP. Insider's article reports that Cumbria thinks Somerset is too far away to form a LEP with and would not back a grouping mainly based on the nuclear industry.

So perhaps these thematic LEPs will need some geographical grounding – for example basing a Seaside Enterprise Partnership on a particular stretch of coastline. The idea of thematic LEPs certainly has potential. The question is how far do you go before a theme is stretched too far?

I remember watching a Western series when I was a boy called “Branded” which started with an officer being ceremonially stripped of his badges of rank, and thrown out of the US Army. The image came to mind as I started writing because I may well get cashiered out of the IED for suggesting this, and formally stripped of my Fellowship.

With news that Bura is in liquidation and that “senior industry figures” are sketching plans for a replacement which might be able to balance its books, I want to suggest that the Institute of Economic Development joins those talks with a view to merger.

IED is the older body, originally formed as the Institution of Economic Development Officers nearly a decade before Bura was conceived. It does good work, with an excellent conference and a suite of formal qualifications running from Certificate through Diploma to Masters. But it is far too small, hovering under 1,000 members all the time I’ve been involved, with minimal profile and less influence. All good stuff, but it’s not got close to its ambition to become the professional body for the economic development profession, and shows no signs of getting closer.

Bura, by contrast, is the brash kid on the block, (sorry, Jackie, nothing personal!), the one with the new bike and the smartest friends. From its earliest days it had bigger ideas and made the effort to get them done, and it has also done good work, most obviously by identifying and publicising good practice. Bura, too, has run useful courses, but it has come no closer to becoming the must-join professional body than IED has. Indeed, with an eye on the bank balance I presume, it has become too much associated with the capital projects side of the business: important, of course, but far from the whole picture.

It’s not straightforward, of course, because many economic development professionals are already members of the RTPI or Rics, with subs to pay and CPD points to accumulate. So it’s not as simple as saying “look across the Atlantic to IEDC, the US-based International Economic Development Council: there’s a model of influence, and serious professional development, which we would do well to emulate”.

It’s not that simple, but do let’s take this opportunity to think big, to draw together the professional development strand which IED has done well, the best practice promotion which Bura has done well, and the effective representation which both have sought, with too little success. There’s a bigger prize to be won.

It was supposed to be a momentous year and it certainly has turned out that way – but for all the wrong reasons. Having just a few months ago celebrated its 20th anniversary, the British Urban Regeneration Association (Bura) is to go into voluntary liquidation.

Rather than ponder what went wrong, perhaps it would be more constructive to consider where we go next. Indeed, in her letter to members announcing the move, chair Jackie Sadek revealed ‘leading industry figures’ were already working on developing a replacement for Bura.

So let’s open it up to those working in regeneration – what would you like to see fill the void left by Bura?

Do we need a body to represent the ‘regeneration sector’ – it is, after all, a collection of different sectors covering many professions.

What functions should be saved? Do organisations and individuals really need a membership body to provide networking opportunities? Who is best placed to deliver training?

From a personal point of view, Bura’s greatest legacy (and one which must be protected) is the rigorous and respected awards schemes run successfully for many years. They have helped highlight and spread best practice and now, more than ever, we need vehicles to perform that role.

The Big Society project seeks to 'give increased power to people to solve problems closer to where they live'. Under the current economic climate, meeting housing needs is increasingly difficult for people and governments. The need for affordable housing is stark: if the price of chicken had increased as fast as house prices since 1971, we’d be paying close to £50 for a roast dinner.

The coalition says it wants more affordable homes. They have introduced a series of reforms to localise decisions around new housebuilding, but there are fundamental challenges in this approach. Home-owners make up 70% of adults in the UK: investors in homes as assets that appreciate greatly in conditions where demand is growing faster than supply.

This represents a strong disincentive for these individuals to support additional housebuilding. The housing market in its current form cannot both deliver wealth accumulation for existing home owners, and affordable opportunities for all members of society to meet their need for accommodation. Policy changes announced so far will not solve deep-rooted problems in the way British society houses itself: they are more likely to worsen the housing crisis than address it.

For starters: the housing minister no longer has a seat in the cabinet, the cuts have been drastic at the Homes and Communities Agency, and reforms to the manifold problems of the social housing sector focus on making tenure more mobile and conditional, but without a Big Society solution to the displacement created by the controversial cut to housing benefits.

Under the localism banner, Regional Spatial Strategies (RSS), which set house building targets for local authorities in England, have been scrapped. RSSs, albeit cumbersome, unpopular, and drafted by unelected Regional Assemblies, had an ambition to plan for something in the range of 240,000 to 290,000 homes per year for the next 20 years: thought to be sufficient to stabilise affordability at 2007 levels and meet future need and demand. In the last year, 113,000 homes were built in England.

Given our nation's impressive protection of the countryside, getting close to RSS target annual completions involved squeezing out new flats and houses from small slithers of land where policy allowed. Many home owners and bowls clubs cashed in on the housing boom by selling off gardens and pitches. Often unpopular to their neighbours, such developments benefited from qualifying against local authority targets that housing development should take place on previously-developed brownfield land. It was, however, hard for local authorities to negotiate any contributions from developers to meet growing infrastructure needs: this model of development was aptly described as 'town cramming' rather than 'town planning'.

The coalition has decided gardens are now to be reclassified as greenfield in the planning system. The popularity of this policy change is not surprising, but this is localism which will serve to choke off potential new housing supply. Vaguely defined Big Society initiatives such as the Right to Build will not compensate - indeed they may serve only to refocus the controversy around new housing development.

Developing new homes is a classic problem of collective action: the imposition is felt by those who neighbour development sites, new residents are seen as a burden to local schools, doctors and parks. Labour's Community Infrastructure Levy is set to standardise the contributions made by developers to local services, rather than the agreements currently negotiated under Section 106 of the Planning Act.

Planners and developers are anxious for the new government to complete the picture of reforms to the system: very little happens in a policy vacuum. Local authorities have scrapped plans for 85,000 homes since the election and 29 national bodies have written to Eric Pickles arguing that planning reform needs something more than nods to localism.

Any attempts to seriously engage with the need for new homes faces a number of challenges – not least to make those homes zero carbon by 2016, a pledge introduced by Labour but without a definition of 'zero carbon'. House prices in Britain are peculiarly volatile, while housebuilders are peculiarly unresponsive to demand, partly due to the rigid planning system.

Support for a housebuilding surge from housebuilders may in reality be limited: it was always naïve for the Labour government to lead developers towards raising supply to the point of bringing down house prices. In a business model which is essentially about short-term “flipping” of land, with a profit on the process of building a home, housebuilders would be losing money on land they had already bought. As Mark Twain quipped in the late 19th Century: “Buy land, they're not making it any more”. The house price bubble was really a land price bubble.

There are quick wins: encouraging self-builders and removing barriers which prevent empty homes being occupied. However, the greatest challenge is fundamental: the public is being encouraged to acquire and speculate on an asset, and also – increasingly, under the localism agenda – responsible for regulating the supply of new homes to be created.

The answers are not simple: in Ireland and Spain, huge booms in house building did not prevent drastic price bubbles and their housing markets remain debilitated today. House prices are also driven by the availability of credit and expectations of future price growth, which is why we hear estate agents blame the media for the recent fall in house prices.

The good news? There's probably never been a better time to try to address fundamental challenges: to build for a bigger society we clearly need a new economy of housing.

This blog is co-published on the new economics foundation blog http://neweconomics.org/blog/2010/08/20/where-will-the-big-society-live

Last month, New Start and Shared Intelligence held a roundtable seminar on Local Enterprise Partnerships, the latest in New Start’s series of RegenFuture events and discussions.

The event brought together local practitioners, analysts and national stakeholders including the Institute of Directors, Work Foundation and Core Cities to identify the key factors and drivers that will make the transition from RDAs to LEPs a success.

Following the event, we responded to the House of Commons’ Business, Innovation and Skills Committee call for evidence to inform their inquiry into LEPs. Our submission set out the core questions which we suggest the Inquiry should follow based on the roundtable discussion.

Julian Dobson blogged some immediate thoughts after the event. This post summarises the key messages in our evidence to the Inquiry.

The big picture emerges – and LEPs are at the centre

The bare bones of the government’s approach to economic development and regeneration are becoming gradually clear.

In his Bloomberg speech this week, the chancellor underlined the shift in investment to 're-focus public spending in those areas that will make a difference to our long-term economic success'.

Instead of programmes which, to their critics, rewarded failure and encouraged dependency, the government will be much more hard-headed about rewarding success and encouraging growth areas to go further and faster.

A few days earlier Eric Pickles reiterated his determination to either abolish or devolve to the local level a whole series of plan-making and delivery powers. In the same interview, he also confessed to having 'great fun abolishing lots of stuff'.

Pickles has encouraged LEPs to be bold in their submissions about the powers they want, and there’s talk that some parts of CLG are lobbying for directly elected mayors to head up LEPs.

With so many other parts of the system being dismantled and the government further strengthening its focus on private-sector led growth and enterprise as the means for delivering wider social goals, the role of LEPs is becoming increasingly important.

Our evidence - making LEPs work

The lobbying to make elected mayors the chair of LEPs neatly highlights our first point to the BIC Committee: LEPs can’t be a peg for every fleeting ministerial whim.

LEPs need to prioritise their functions and investments to ensure there is a clarity of purpose across their activities. These activities need to be guided by the needs of local businesses and enterprises, including social enterprise, and be delivered through flexible partnerships.

Central government must be equally rigorous and consistent about freedoms and flexibilities, and encourage local innovation.

The inevitable discussions about structures and roles within LEPs, as the new arrangements settle in, should not distract from fundamental challenge – whether LEPs can attract additional funding and direct it in ways that add value to local activity.

Finally, we argued that there should be a role for tackling deprivation and driving regeneration where that was a local priority. Promoting enterprise growth isn’t just for better off areas.

Keeping up the debate

Join the debate about LEPs and the future of regeneration here: http://www.regenfuture.org/

 

With the cuts and reductions in the amounts of resource available to local enterprise agencies, community group networks, other local infrastructure bodies, etc; we’re seeing the amount of support available to start-up groups, enterprises (both social and private), charities and so on rapidly diminishing...
 

But this is at a time when there’s universal recognition of the increasing need for them to be supported, and for them to gain the knowledge that they need to not only be sustainable, but also prosper...
 

I wonder then if I can suggest that rather than bemoan the state of things, that instead we go to our local library.
 

Take my local library in Todmorden – it has shelves of books and CD-ROMs on different aspects of setting up and managing an enterprise or other group (covering everything from import/export to employment law, marketing to book-keeping and everything in-between), a copy of the Grant Making Trusts Directory (reference only) and the national Voluntary Sector Agencies Directory, free internet access, a coffee machine, late night opening... its surely therefore also an obvious focal point for groups seeking support – they could maybe make use of the big tables to meet together around? (And just to ‘complete this virtuous circle’, Todmorden library was originally gifted to the town by a social enterprise – the local Co-operative Society).
 

Of course, some of you may be unsure how to navigate these vast unchartered shelves of knowledge and tools where everything is logged using secret coded numbers – fear not, for there are always librarians on hand: kind souls who take pity on the uninitiated and will help you to find what you most need.
Our cousins over the pond in the US are already starting to think in these terms, looking at libraries afresh as to the role they can play in supporting not only lifelong learning, but also the business community.

So... when was the last time you visited your local library?
 

The economic realities of rising energy prices and limited fossil fuel resources, the moral imperative for sharing the earth’s resources equitably as well as sustainably, and the growing evidence base for climate change from greenhouse gases are all making the growth in microgeneration an unstoppable trend with substantial business benefits.

Low-carbon economic growth is recognised across the north west as the essential method by which we will protect our future prosperity, and the carbon content of energy is currently at damagingly high levels.

Reducing our energy demand is an imperative we all can appreciate, but we can do even better than this when we start to also harness the benefits of microgeneration. With the built environment accounting for around 45% of carbon emissions, we can see that improving the carbon and energy performance of buildings is crucial to our sustainable future.

All innovations take a time to bed in, to become trusted, ordinary and mainstream. I am confident that the Microgeneration Certification Scheme is greatly helping consumers gain confidence in this new initiative.

A few years ago I would have said that most of us knew more about the energy performance of a new fridge than we did of our homes and our workplaces. Not any more, happily.

Many public buildings now display their energy performance for all to see, and an increasing number of families are doing the same maths at home. We also see building regulations driving up the requirements within the construction and design industries, with a further performance increment in October this year.

I believe that soon we will talk of a building’s energy performance (kWh/m2/year) in the same way we naturally discuss a car’s miles/gallon.

Just a few years ago we worried about whether the target for 10% onsite renewables was achievable in a new development. Today it is now possible to design ordinary-looking homes, which consume so little energy, that microgeneration could credibly supply far beyond 10%. And I believe we will soon see energy-positive buildings as the norm.

The status of recent proposals that social housing be only for those in greatest financial need is unclear. But whether it was simply political musing, or is seriously on the agenda, it is, even just for starters, a very bad idea. 

And so, without very careful preparation, is the idea that if your house becomes 'underoccupied', or you are job-seeking, you must move on.

Such proposals can result only in one thing - more so-called 'no hope' estates, and fast. 

Interdependence

Surely by now we have learnt that a degree of social and economic mix is essential in any resilient community, as is a level of stability in terms of who lives there? 

People are not, as some new-think politicians seem to believe, micro-economic units standing alone, without dependency on or reference to others.  Almost all of us are connected in our day-to-day lives with family members, neighbours, friends, classmates and in numerous other ways as well. 

Sometimes this interconnection might be related to intergenerational worklessness (which we all agree is a serious problem); but it is also often connected with the shared care and co-production of support services which permit people to work and to share everyday community life.

Diversity of need and experience

Perhaps the politicians who suggested the 'move on if you have (any) money' model of social housing forget that by no means all workers are single and able-bodied with few commitments - a group which in fact comprises quite a small minority of the population.

Many workers are parents who care for children, adults who care for elderly parents, people whose cultural expectations are towards close extended family, people with disabilities who need support to engage in the economy, young people who cannot afford as yet to move away from the family home....   Need we continue?  All these 'groups' of workers or putative workers require a stable home location most of the time; the last thing they need is an enforced move away from their current housing the minute they earn a few extra quid.

And the same applies to people who now seemingly rattle around in their empty homes; some of them receive frequent visitors (grandchildren..) and some might well like a smaller place. But almost all of them want to stay closeby, albeit many of them are newly-single (and often, sadly, also newly bereaved).

Stronger communities

And that's before we begin to think about housing as community.   Many people who live in social housing have put down roots, they have invested money in their homes, they maybe provide working (employed) role models to young people and children in their areas, perhaps they also provide support for their communities in other ways too.

The removal of people from social housing because they are 'too wealthy' or 'too single' to stay where they are is, at best, a rapid route to dismantling stable communities along with the less positive ones.  At worst it is an idea which leaves a very nasty question mark about the powers of the state over vulnerable people.

Home ownership expectations

In other parts of Europe the expectation that one should buy one's own home is far lower than in the UK, which makes the UK position rather odd, given that our population density is higher than most other countries'. Social housing stock is nonetheless disappearing rapidly.

Perhaps we all need to consider more carefully other models of housing provision - more good private rental?  more shared ownership?  bigger apartments to accommodate families properly? 

But it's likely that the rising generation will be less intent on owning their own homes anyway, given the difficulties for them of doing so (difficulties, it might be noted, that have applied also to some other generations; 'only' the population demographic has changed).

No insight?

The 'move on if you're monied (or newly single)' idea reflects fundamentally poor insight and understanding on the part of those who propose it.

The idea does not in any case stack up politically - imagine the headlines, the first time a family is evicted for being 'too rich' or 'too single'.  Nor does it necessarily stack in policy and economic terms, not least because making local communities less stable can lead to long-term costs.

Homes for real people

But most critically of all, this idea demonstrates a model of human activity based entirely on the economic bottom line, as though all else is secondary. 

This is errant nonsense. Most of us have a life outside the parameters of our wage (or even benefit) package, a life which for many is more meaningful than the 9-to-5 one.  Our homes and communities are important to us, whether we are in paid work or not.

Economics and government budgets must be tools employed skilfully in the service of all citizens and communities, not used wilfully to circumscribe and restrict some of them. If the housing powers-that-be don't understand even that, I guess we're in for a pretty bad time for a while yet.

The Big Society is all about taking action at a local level. Citizens are being urged by the coalition government to take more responsibility for their communities, not to wait for the state to act on their behalf. But our recent research with Urban Forum shows that the state, in the form of local councillors, can often be crucial in helping community organisations achieve success.

Of course bassac’s network of community organisations will be key in suggesting new ideas, showing what works in their community and finding ways to do more with less. But we found that our members have much to gain from being proactive and engaging with local councillors. We were inundated with examples of community organisations that have gained greater access to their council, attracted publicity, made valuable contacts and gained funding through having made this link.

One group of residents got together to work on local planning in the area; they found a councillor very helpful in looking at specific planning issues. At Cricklewood Homeless Concern, they wanted to develop work with “street active” young people who were causing complaints from residents; two councillors joined forces with the working group and offered access to funding opportunities, links with central government and support from their own local authority.

Everyone we spoke to accepted that councillors want to gain political advantage from their involvement – more votes and the higher profile which comes from working with good causes – but they also showed how much this relationship had helped the success of their campaign.

For us it’s all about creating a two-way relationship. Our member organisations are rooted in their communities and are a rich resource for local councillors. But these organisations can’t just wait to be consulted. They need to be politically pro-active in their community – approaching local councillors, identifying key issues and explaining what they can offer. We’re working to help our members get this right and we hope this will enable them to play a key role in the Big Society.

The Handy guide to local action and working with councillors from bassac and Urban Forum is available free to voluntary and community organisations.

One of the common accusations thrown at social media is that, while we may know what people we’ve never met ate for breakfast, we no longer have the time – or inclination - to chew the fat with people who live within a few feet of us.

As a child of the 80s – and thus one who grew up listening to the original opening credits of Neighbours needing ‘to get to know each other’ to become ‘good friends’ – I’m aware that in 2010, things have certainly changed.

Cloying they may have been (and they drove my parents to distraction on a daily basis), but the soap opera’s lyrics – if not, mercifully, its storylines - espoused the sort of culture of ‘neighbourliness’ I grew up in. We would water plants for neighbours when they were on holiday. The kids all played together outside. Another family a few doors down moved to America but stay in touch even now.

Kevin Harris, who writes the Neighbourhoods blog, recently commented that ‘neighbouring ain't what it used to be’. Certainly, the Australian soap opera’s refrain of how ‘next door is only a footstep away’ is often at odds with the situation today. Next door can sometimes feel a world away.

I am fortunate that my neighbourhood is pretty inclusive and sociable. I know neighbours on both sides and have made good friends out of several residents from further down and across our road. A simple greeting has often turned into exchanging pleasantries, which progressed to a drink in the pub and helping each other out – pet-sitting duties, running errands, lifts to work.

But when a local community group organised a recent street party as part of the national Big Lunch campaign and I ended up attending it on my own, I found myself a little nervous. It was strange, especially as I knew there would probably be one or two familiar faces there - and sure enough one greeted me before I’d gone a few yards.

My reluctance was short-lived after I quickly realised that even if I didn’t know anyone there that was surely the POINT of the get-together. So I joined the street party and spent time with three or four current friends I hadn’t seen in a while. I can also now put names to a handful of faces I previously saw every day but had never really acknowledged.

Later, after the face paint and food had been cleared away, I swapped my local world for the global online one and posted a picture of the street party on Twitter.

A few minutes later a friend replied: ‘That is fantastic. I wish they would do that on my street’.

Young people…they’re everywhere.

And many of them are getting involved in running our towns, cities and villages to make things better for all of us.

It may not be as headline grabbing as Nation Citizen Service, but up to 19,800 young people are already making big changes to their local areas, according to new research from the British Youth Council (BYC).

The young volunteers, mostly aged 11-17, are involved through local ‘youth councils', helping to make decisions that can have a positive impact on the whole community.

They make sure the views of other young people are heard by local leaders. Of 620 youth councils surveyed earlier this year by BYC, the vast majority believed they represented the views of young people, either through campaigning or being consulted by decision-makers.

Youth councils enable young people from different backgrounds to come together with decision-makers. ‘Youth councillors’ themselves are a diverse group of young people - more representative of their local communities than adult councillors. BYC found that 7% were of dual heritage, 8% were Asian and 7% were black.

Through their efforts, one in eight of youth councils felt that they had saved money for their local council and the majority of youth councils said young people had got more involved in making decisions over the last year.

It is crucial that youth councils can continue their contribution to the ‘Big Society’ and that the involvement of volunteer youth councillors is recognised, alongside good practice of youth councils themselves.

We would like to see decision-makers in local, devolved and national governments support the youth council network and BYC, as the national youth council of the UK.
 

Elijah is a 90-year-old war veteran, whose home of 56 years has been CPO-ed. He wants to end his days there and doesn’t see why it should be demolished under Oldham’s Pathfinder scheme – particularly since the recession has led to building been put on hold.

Whatever your stance on regeneration, this is a strong story. I’ve got it all – strong quotes, striking portraits and quality audio. Yet could I get it published? Nope.

A TV programme was briefly interested, then wasn’t. Two national newspapers took it, each sitting on it for weeks, before spiking it. I knew I couldn’t change the outcome for Eli, but it would have been nice to rattle some cages. Isn’t that what journalists are meant to do?

I have a love-hate relationship with regeneration. I care deeply for people like Eli but the subject confuses me, enrages me and wearies me for all kinds of reasons.

As with so much in journalism, the fact I’ve spent much of the past four years covering the issue is completely accidental. I was a newspaper reporter when I was sent to visit my first community affected by Housing Market Renewal, Anfield in Liverpool. The paper folded and I sold the story to the Guardian. Emails arrived from other campaigners and it snowballed.

Since then, I’ve visited every Pathfinder area except Birmingham. I’ve often focused on the people fighting the demolition of their properties, and those living in limbo, surrounded by degredation and vandalism.

This wasn’t a conscious choice – just the stories which found their way to me. I’ve had them published in national newspapers as well as the specialist press. While it’s always been difficult to sell regeneration stories – too northern? too working class? too dry? – I’m now really struggling as my outlets disappear. The indifference I’m hit with time after time grinds me down, and it’s becoming financially unviable to cover the subject.

A year ago I learned to capture audio, and I decided to revisit Pathfinder. So I set off on a little mission to photograph and record the voices of as many campaigners as possible, in a humble attempt to document this issue in a fuller way.

This was a self-funded project which remains unpublished in a formal sense, other than short snippets on Street Fighters, a website I’ve set up to carry all of my regeneration work to date.

For the multimedia I visited upwards of 25 people, from Liverpool to Hull and Middlesbrough, before running out of money and time. I still have a handful of edited pieces to put up over the coming weeks. It’s an open-ended project, which may be of interest to some.

Perhaps inevitably, my views on regeneration have become more nuanced since I visited Anfield back in June 2006. I know that some condemned housing was sub-standard and needed to go.

I know there were serious socio-economic problems in the areas singled out for regeneration. I know that for most people there is life after clearance. If you’re young enough and can afford a mortgage, moving on is not such a problem.

But it can be no concidence that some of those who have fought hardest against these projects – ending up in public inquiries and High Court hearings – are older people, who have the most to lose. Not your average activists by any stretch of the imagination, these campaigners have usually paid off their mortgages and are living on fixed incomes.

They don’t feel they are being offered like for like. Time and time again, I’ve been told by people that if their compensation had got them an equivalent house and genuinely left them no worse off, they would have moved on without a fight.

I’m only a journalist and don’t claim to be a regeneration expert. But there seems to be some inherent unfairnesses within the system – from the skewed consultations to the low compensation offers, to the 90-year-old veterans being turfed out for nothing. There must be a better way.

‘It’s economic partnership, Jim, but not as we know it.’

The view of one of the participants at New Start’s third Real Regeneration roundtable event held in London this week.

The subject was local enterprise partnerships (LEPs) and the event gathered together representatives from think tanks, local authorities, business and academia.

Post-RDAs, what forms and functions will ‘the next generation’ of economic partnership involve?

Popular views included the importance of the size and scale of LEPs and the fact this would vary geographically from place to place.

Could they be a buffer between national government and local drive? What about the role of civic leadership and civil society in adding value? How will LEPs collaborate and exercise leverage with other partners like Jobcentre Plus or universities? How will LEPs in depressed areas engage and make a difference?

Sarah Middleton, chief executive of Black Country Consortium, felt LEPs needed to be business-focused and ‘fleet of foot in terms of responding to local needs’. Watch a film of Ms Middleton outlining her views of the opportunities and issues presented by LEPs in more detail here.

The questions and answers generated by the LEP roundtable will now form the basis of a submission by New Start and event co-hosts Shared Intelligence to the forthcoming inquiry of the Business, Innovation and Skills (Bis) select committee.

A special report on the roundtable event and outlining the Bis submission will also feature in the September edition of New Start.

The default position in much of the larger charity sector seems to veer between falsely claiming it has always and forever championed local unpaid community action, or a visceral resentment that there in no longer any money to be had as preferred arm’s length contractors of the state.

As we all now know, that particular gravy train has left the station and won’t be coming back anytime soon. I’ve been surprised by how many smaller groups have been saying good riddance in the face of the demise of their larger peers.

And this is precisely because there is a serious lack of humility and reflection on how well the voluntary sector shared its wealth, and pushed power downwards, at a time when it had plenty of it. Likewise there is often a lack of planning for cuts that any and every government would make, regardless of party ideology.

These are horrible times for public and voluntary sector folk alike as the redundancies come in waves of misery. But by protesting about the unexpected scale of the cuts we may be missing the point not only about the internal voluntary sector monopoly market, but the wider global one.

At a recent talk by Danny Dorling at Cabe he made the memorable comment that we could get rid of the deficit in many ways if we had a mind to; simply taxing the thousand richest people in our country more proportionately would go a long way. I’d add that closer attention to money laundering, which accounts for 5% of global financial transactions, might be an idea, along with closure of the most gratuitous off shore banks and tax avoidance industries, rather than recent encouragement of what amounts to little more than white collar crime. (Peter Mandelson: New Labour is deeply relaxed about people being filthy rich).

We need a radically different set of economic arrangements and this is what we should be putting our energies into. The Better Banking Coalition shines a light on an aspect of this; what we need is the social movement across society to demand change, which would mean a new set of behaviours from our sector beyond being organisationally predatory, mimicking the more unhealthy elements of private sector practice.

Some of us have always been political; others may have to go on crash course of activism. And not only the activism by formula brands and government are now turning to but hard won experience that comes from fighting in a much wider inclusive way.

For years the old school community workers saw any kind of politics stripped out, and were labelled as dinosaurs. The bland market and management models packaged as community capacity building were sold to the sector and then rejected by community groups who didn’t see the point.

There has been a massive failure of inappropriate top down voluntary sector infrastructure – we need to own that before we think about complaining about cuts. Credit to the great work that has taken place, by many small, medium and occasionally large outfits, but in the scheme of things, most local groups, most of the time will tell a different story about how little support was on offer and where the money actually went.

Sadly that local support and development will inevitably become even less and is worth fighting for but if we are going to fight and win, we need to know exactly where we have reached, and know when we are on strong ground, and when we are weak.

All of society would benefit, including the Big Society, from a confident, determined and united voluntary and community sector, but such a force would need to need to be far more reflective, innovative and equitable in its dealings with itself and others.

I’ll come clean: some of what my company does now as evaluation is a waste of money. Taking really very modest projects and programmes and applying to them the full panoply of the Government’s Impact Evaluation Framework is simply daft. We do it because our clients’ funders require us to do it.

I cherish the moment when a former colleague gave a public sector client a little lecture on how to do a perfect evaluation, only to be told: “we all know about the Gold Standard: I’m interested in what’s realistic”.

The risk is that funders will stop paying for evaluation because the money isn’t there to pay for the Gold Standard.

Yet we have Ministers taking every opportunity to say how they want “evidence-based decision-making”, and conscientious managers as keen as ever to know whether what they’re doing is working or not. The problem is that good evidence doesn’t just appear from thin air. And credible evidence requires the teller to have a degree of objectivity.

Babies and bathwater come to mind, but it doesn’t need to be like this. We’ve supported clients before with slim-line – ie cheap – external support to their evaluation, helping them to design a robust process, and the main research tools, and critiquing their draft report, but leaving the research in the middle (which is the expensive bit) to them. In one case, I designed a process which had project leaders pairing up to critique each others’ projects, using a structured design, and tools, which I’d helped shape with the overall programme manager.

Was it as good as a classic, wholly-external, evaluation? No. Was it a good deal better than nothing? Certainly.

If you’re determined to write a report saying that everything is wonderful, this approach will give you lots of scope to cheat – but you’d be wasting your time, and cheating those whom you work for, because no one will believe your report.

But if you are conscientious and want to get informed outsiders to help you to review what you’re doing so you can make it work better, this approach is a good half-way house. No one gains if we simply stop evaluating because we can no longer afford the Gold Standard.