GEORGE OSBORNE will use his forthcoming Budget to announce the creation of 10 enterprise zones.

The zones are to be set up in deprived parts of Britain which have the potential to benefit most from them. Surely Merseyside is a front-runner to be granted one of them.

The idea is that planning and tax rules will be relaxed to encourage investment, particularly in the manufacturing sector, which, in turn, will create jobs and wealth in the deprived locality.

On the face of it, enterprise zones should help.

Before the crash, Ireland’s low rate of corporation tax was credited with stimulating investment in that country, particularly foreign investment.

Many observers, however, feel that what we are getting is a repeat of the old Tory prescription for regional economic development, a rehash of a policy that didn’t work that well when it was first implemented in the early 1980s.

The principal reason offered for that first attempt at enterprise zones failing was that the vast majority of businesses moving to them came from other, often nearby, places.

In other words, the zones merely displaced investment and economic activity from one place to another, at some cost to the Exchequer.

The Government may attempt to partially overcome the problem of displacement by decreeing that only start-up businesses can benefit from the tax breaks.

It all depends where the jobs are displaced from. If they are displaced from Garston to Speke, then it has little value.

If they come from relatively prosperous Chester to Speke, there may be some value.

Of course, there are social goals to consider, which may justify overlooking the displacement issue. If you can create a supply of jobs where there is an intergenerational tradition of worklessness, then maybe it’s worth it.

Yet, leaving aside the good intentions, the whole idea looks like a lukewarm rehash of an old idea dreamed up by a Chancellor desperate to make it look as if he is doing more than swinging an axe.

THERE is an inevitable tension between the ongoing and necessary public sector cuts and an understandable desire to maintain decent services.

That applies to the provision of business support services, as much as any other area of government-funded spending. This is particularly true when many people who are being made redundant from public sector jobs might be thinking about starting their own businesses.

Yet it’s hard to argue for business support spending when frontline NHS jobs are being cut, investment in schools slashed and social care for the elderly halved.

So it is little surprise that Liverpool Vision’s budget has been cut.

The thing is the amount Liverpool Vision’s budget has been cut by represents a small fraction of some of the bonuses earned by Barclays’ top paid staff.

There is something deeply and profoundly unfair in the notion that some bankers can enjoy bumper take-home pay packets at a time when others well down the pay league are either losing their jobs or being asked to take pay cuts. Barclays’ top earner raked in more than £14m last year. That’s £60,000 a working day. Even Premier League footballers would blush. That daily rate is four or five times the annual pay of a social worker.

It must be hard for the social worker to understand why such high pay is necessary to get somebody to do a day’s work.