Clegg’s regions fund is a fig leaf – and not a very big one

Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg

Has anyone noticed that the FTSE has gone down continuously since the Budget? Bond and currency holders may like what they see. Those who invest in the real economy don’t. This is getting bloody.

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.

Progressive insanity

I do wish the Government would stop trying to make our flesh crawl with all this panic around the deficit.

The angst they’re emitting is stirring no-one except the ratings agencies – and not in a good way. They need to calm down and think before emoting – unless the point of it all is not to deal with the problem so much as to rubbish their predecessors.

New Labour made the mistake of carrying the campaigning on into Government and the New Politics seem very like the old in this regard. Stop campaigning, start governing – and slow down. In other words, be more conservative, though that is perhaps too much to ask of this “progressive” coalition.

By the way, the next politician to claim to be “progressive” gets terminated with extreme prejudice. I am proud to be both reactionary and revolutionary as required but never progressive. The last straw was reading Nick Clegg claiming that unlike the cuts of the 1980s his Government’s cuts would be progressive. I’m reminded that stages in mental or physical decline are often described as progressive. And I add: Thatcher didn’t in fact cut. Under her aegis, pubic spending increased.

Personally I’d prefer reactionary cuts which don’t happen over progressive cuts which do. I end where I started. The deficit is serious but not as catastrophic or unmanageable as is being made out. More serious than the deficit is the double-dip recession which excessive austerity – like some self-fulfilling prophecy – will trigger. What really worries me as someone from Wales who works in regeneration is that that recession will have a geography to it – and it won’t be the parts of the UK in which the coalition are electorally strongest.