Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg
Regeneration is a real world event, so I guess we are in the worried camp down there with FTSE investors.
But worry not. Our troubles are over before they start. Coming over the hill to rescue our sector and the regions (oops, that’s so last century of me) outside London and the South-East is the Clegg Regional (is that word allowed by Nick Clegg, but not by Eric Pickles?) Growth Fund.
Faster than a speeding bullet, our deputy prime minister has raced to fill the funding gap left by the sado-monetarism of the cuts and the communities secretary’s abolition of the regional (that word again) development agencies.
Well, maybe ‘fill’ is a tad overstated. The £1 billion Clegg Fund doesn’t come near to replacing the RDAs’ funding, let alone manage to compensate for the 25 per cent cut in public spending we face. I’m sure the North is terribly proud that the Clegg Fund was launched in Bradford, but it would take billions to replace the lost public spending and GDP that the public sector-dependent North is about to experience.
The Clegg Fund is a fig leaf and not a very big one – it won’t cover up Nick’s unmentionables.
The idea that a fund of any size could be ready to spend on anything before the middle of next year is also farcical. This is Britain. We take two years to agree the funding for a project meant to be delivered within three years – and then spend all the unspent money badly in the days before the end of the financial year in year three.
Given the instability inherent in a coalition, there’s the real prospect of cuts happening under this government and the fund only beginning to spend on projects under the next one. Welcome to power.
I have an idea. Why not see if there is some existing project approval process or body that can hit the ground running and receive and process project applications around the growth agenda without delay or worries about probity? Perhaps this could operate at a wider level than a city but at a lower level than the nation – I wonder if the RDAs are busy? Perhaps they could help administer the Clegg Fund – or am I missing something?
This column first appeared in the 12 July 2010 edition of Regeneration & Renewal. To read more columns by Tim, click here.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tagged: Budget, Eric Pickles, Nick Clegg, RDAs, Regional Growth Fund |
Tim Williams 
It is difficult to comprehend the implications of the government’s whirlwind of announcements and in Tim’s phrase sado-monetarist passion for inflicting cuts.
It is clear that their goal is to create a reserve pool of labour and other resources which can be brought into use when the cost of labour our assets falls low enough for their use to be profitable.
The use of unemployment as tool of economic policy has echoes of the 30’s, drive down wages and reduce the provision of support for the poor to force them to take any works that is available. Perhaps because the generation that suffered the means test has largely passed on those in power think that they can bring it back.
Differential economic performance between regions is endemic, driven by changes in technology, communications and resources. Region policy can mitigate these effects if applied consistently, vigorously and over time.
The party that brought “Lloyd George’s Ambulance Wagon” as the 20 th Century opened are offering us “Nick Clegg’s sticking plaster” on the economic haemorrhage caused by the deliberate deflation of regional economies.