THE organisation set up to win badly-needed private-sector jobs for Merseyside is not making enough progress, Lord Heseltine said yesterday.
In a rebuke to the region, he said he and former Tesco chief Sir Terry Leahy should not have had to write a blueprint for growing Merseyside’s economy.
His intervention comes after the Centre of Cities recently criticised the performance of the Liverpool City Region ‘local enterprise partnerships’ (LEP), which still does not have a chairman.
In a speech at the University of Liverpool, Mr Heseltine said: “The LEP has not made the progress that LEPs in other parts of the country have. Perhaps that is one of the challenges that we need to be concerned with.”
He was challenged by St Helens council leader Marie Rimmer, who sits on the LEP board, who said many of the ideas in his report had already been set in motion.
“But these things were not happening, they were being talked about,” he replied.
Supporters of the LEP will point to an announcement made last night that it had been involved in bidding for £25m of Regional Growth Fund money to help support the automotive and aerospace supply chain.
The bid represents the first time individual LEPs have worked together to submit one application for a project spanning different areas of the country.
Mr Heseltine went on to say a directly-elected mayor for Liverpool is an important stepping stone towards getting a mayor for the whole of Merseyside.
He appeared to a concede that competing political interests would prevent a move directly to a mayor for Merseyside.
But he stressed that a mayor for the region was the most desirable long-term solution for delivering more power to Merseyside.
“Sometimes the best can be the enemy of the good. I believe the leadership of the region under a mayor who is elected in Liverpool is a very important stepping stone and that is what is provided for in the localism bill.”
Last week ministers announced a surprise rapid-fire consultation to decide which powers city mayors should enjoy. The document was seen by some as the opportunity for Merseyside to put forward a blueprint for a city-region mayor – as proposed by Lord Heseltine and Sir Terry Leahy in their report.
But a poll by the Daily Post has found there is deep division over the subject among Merseyside’s political leaders.
