Businesses and the Regions

We believe that UKTI must be the lead voice abroad. The Minister can draw from that exactly what I mean. If the RDAs wish to participate, that is fine. However, there should be no competing offices and no competing resources; rather, there should be one powerful voice abroad. I hope that that answers his point. My main concern is not only the confusion in the Government's policy of having competing bids abroad, but the fact that after nine years and £13 billion, the RDAs have failed to close the regional gap. Independent statistics show that, outside the greater south-east, England's regions grew faster in the seven years before the RDAs were introduced than in the seven years afterwards. Indeed, the rate of business creation in some of those regions is static. The result is that whereas the seven regions outside the greater south-east represented 64 per cent. of the nation's economic output in 1992, by 2006, the latest year for which we have statistics, that figure had dropped to 56 per cent. I am not saying that everything that has been done has been wrong or that every pound spent has been wasted. However, the fact remains that the economic divide, which logically lies at the heart of a regional economy policy, is worse today than when those agencies began their work.