Absolutely. The shift of power from the centre out to the regions is massively important and I will talk about the importance of local enterprise partnerships shortly, but first I want to talk about the impact of combined authorities in my part of the country.
Even though Rugby is right in the middle of the country, under the old regional development agency model we were placed in the west midlands because Warwickshire was put in the west midlands. However, my town’s economic links are much closer to places like Lutterworth and Leicester in Leicestershire and Daventry and Northampton in Northamptonshire. In so many instances we in Rugby look east rather than west. That is one reason why I have some concerns about the developments in the west midlands. It is entirely right that the urban area of the west midlands—Birmingham, Solihull, Walsall, Dudley, Sandwell and Wolverhampton—comes together. I ran a business in Rugby, and we looked at that block of authorities as one big market. In fact we did not know where one authority ended and the other started because to us it was one big market.