Industry (Government Support)

I have very little time. Many Labour Members referred particularly to regional issues, and I have to say to them that of course we understand the concern about regional imbalances in our economy. In fact, another measure that deteriorated over the past 10 years has been the gap in GDP between different regions of our economy. If we are to tackle the problem of regional imbalances, we have to look objectively at the performance of regional development agencies. The report from the National Audit Office, published in March this year, made it clear that the NAO was""unable to conclude that the regional wealth benefits actually generated"" by RDAs""were as much as they could and should have been, and are therefore value for money."" The report went on to refer to "weaknesses", which""in many cases, undermined the RDAs' ability to make decisions and set priorities to maximise regional economic wealth"." It concluded that RDAs were simply not doing the job they were supposed to do. That is why Government Members believe that RDA boundaries do not reflect functional economic areas; we wish to enable local enterprise partnerships to reflect better the natural economic geography of the areas that they serve. We are committed to replacing RDAs with local enterprise partnerships and we will invite local groups of councils and business leaders to come together to consider how they wish to form local enterprise partnerships.