TWO initiatives announced yesterday to replace the work currently done by regional development agencies failed to impress.

I don’t like what I have heard so far about Local Enterprise Partnerships, principally because of the last word in the name.

Partnership is an overused word in quangoland. The denizens of this world have their highly honed definitions of “partnership”, but the concept is rarely put into action.

The idea that different local authorities are going to chip in and spend a huge wedge of their individual resources on a bridge or a road in just one borough is far-fetched.

Local authorities are inevitably parochially minded and will without doubt squabble about how to dish out the dosh. There won’t be agreement, they won’t work together: not unless the structure and resources available to the new LEPs are property vested in them.

As for the £1bn regional growth fund, also announced yesterday, it won’t go far, not after it has been divided up between all regions.

The plan to abolish the North West Development Agency and other RDAs is no surprise. The Conservatives are dogmatically opposed to regional agencies because they emerged a little over a decade ago out of the then Labour government’s ambition to devolve some powers to regional assemblies. That whole concept fell flat, though, when the great British public reacted to it with the utmost apathy.

There is no sense of people around the North West region sharing a common identity. We do not think of ourselves as north-westerners.

The people of Cumbria live in a very different world to the people of inner city Liverpool or Manchester. Cumbria may as well be on Mars for all the affinity and issues the people there have in common with Scousers. As for Liverpool and Manchester, centuries of history suggest the cities are more likely to be at loggerheads than agree to region-wide economic strategies.