New economic guidance for councils is ‘light touch’
Councils’ top priority under their new economic development role will be to improve local residents’ access to work and job retention, government proposals revealed this week.
Draft DCLG guidance designed to prepare local authorities for their new role singles out this area as a priority objective, along with earlier collaboration between councils, businesses and social enterprises on economic development strategies.
Other highlighted themes in the guidance include business start-ups and growth, whether local businesses and universities are collaborating to their potential and what social and economic factors affect local worklessness.
From April, all councils will have a statutory duty to prepare annual assessments of their local economy. These will help to guide economic decisions and investment.
The Local Government Association (LGA) had previously argued that the introduction of guidance in preparing assessments would stifle councils' innovation.
Ian Keating, a senior policy consultant at the LGA, conceded that the organisation had lost that particular argument, but said that there was nothing in the document it fundamentally disagreed with.
'Luckily it is very light touch,' he said.
The DCLG hopes that the assessments can help encourage more informed decisions and investments by local authorities and their partners, based on an up-to-date and full understanding of the local economy.
The department is encouraging councils to work with neighbouring authorities on their assessments where there are cross boundary issues, in particularly those in London and with multi area agreement partnerships.
Local government minister Lord McKenzie said the guidance would help the UK’s efforts to work towards an economic recovery as early as possible. ‘Councils and their partners can start to think about how they should best prepare for their assessments so that they can hit the ground running next year,’ he said.
But Neil McInroy, chief executive of the Centre for Local Economic Strategies, said the guidance fails to deliver on the challenge of creating a new wave of economic development thinking and strategy.
'We need a change in culture and more innovative practice in how we do local economic development. This guidance relies too heavily on previous ways of thinking - the economic world has moved on’.
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