Local Enterprise Partnerships offer a number of interesting challenges. The brief from Government is very broad - tackle the issues that will unlock private sector growth. Address the full range including housing, transport, planning. At the same time, the recent White Paper - "Local Growth" offers relatively little in terms of detailed guidance for how LEPs should get to grips with the issues. The guidance is light touch - permissive, rather than prescriptive. This has to be as being in line with the Government's approach to new localism.

The challenge is for partners to come up with some genuinely fresh thinking in order to address business growth and regeneration in a time of shrinking public investment.

SOA Development track record
SOA Development was involved in supporting and writing three LEP proposals, one of which - Coast to Capital  - has already been held up as an exemplar at the BIS Select Committee inquiry  into LEPs. We are now working on the implementation of Coast to Capital and also supporting development of LEPs in London.

One of the notable things about being involved in three proposals was how different they were from each other. This is as it should be as each LEP should reflect the particular circumstances of the economy they cover. Based on our experience and hearing about the process that others followed, there are some lessons for the next stage:

• Strong input from businesses gave the proposals sharpness and a grounding in issues as local businesses themselves experience them. There have been criticisms that some LEP proposals have been too public sector oriented. In the next stage, wider business engagement will be really critical - and in the longer term LEPs will need transparent mechanisms to allow businesses to get their views heard.

• A smaller number of objectives and a tight focus on a few issues that will drive the rest of the economy seems to work best. One of the proposals we worked on had just two priorities - insisted on by business leaders - and it has attracted many favourable comments. There is a temptation to include in the LEP priorities all the things that could possibly impact in the business environment. However, this tends to lead to a clone-zone proposal, which does not adequately reflect the local economy.

Getting the partnerships right has taken the most time. Even where there were pre-existing business and public sector partnerships, it has not necessarily been easy, as can be seen with the number of overlapping proposals.

Partnerships have now had their feedback from Government, with 24 being given a green light, some been asked to do some more work, and some getting a fairly firm red light.

How can SOA Development help?
Whichever way it has gone for your LEP proposal there will be plenty to do - either getting busy with implementation or re-jigging the proposal in the light of the feedback. SOA Development can help.

We have teamed up with Simpson Consulting to offer a team with depth and expertise which can help you with the next stage of the development of your LEP. With our expertise gained from hands-on involvement, we can support you in:

• Getting the partnerships right, including sorting out over-lapping proposals
• Establishing governance and structure
• Business engagement - finding business leaders and gathering views directly from firms
• Planning the work of the LEP - demonstrating that it is going to work and actually make a difference
• Assembling the detailed evidence base required for setting goals and priorities
• Preparing bids for the Regional Growth Fund

If you would like to discuss how we can help with the next stage, please do call Ian Parkes on 07768 993704 or e-mail