Welcome to the affluent south!

So, the race is on for Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire to get their snouts into a £950m pot of government money intended to help the economy grow.
We’ll need to do a whole lot better than we did in the first round of bids for this Regional Growth Fund.
The Local Enterprise Partnership put together 38 applications worth a total of £112m. And we ended up with next to nothing.
There was much soul-searching at the LEP afterwards, which has sought to understand why some pretty professional applications fully backed by the relevant local authorities got nowhere.
And their conclusion? We need to be a bit further north.
Okay, so that was only one of the conclusions. On a more pragmatic level, the real clue as to why the LEP’s efforts drew a blank is contained in the area’s one successful bid: Molecular Profiles, a Nottingham science business, was awarded £1.6m to support a wider investment programme which will create new, high-quality jobs fairly quickly.
It applied to the Regional Growth Fund itself – and bids direct from business is what the government was really looking for.
There remains an irony here. The government appears to have put itself in a position where it prefers bids from companies, not from LEPs – organisations which IT set up. LEPs are still struggling to establish their relevance to business and this hasn’t helped.
But back to us being in the wrong place. I went to a meeting of the local LEP the other day and heard Richard Williams, director of regeneration at Derby City Council and a LEP board member, say, with tongue-in-cheek: “We are now part of the affluent south, not part of impoverished middle England or the north.”
What he was getting at was a set of government metrics which classify the English regions according to their economic strength. All other things being equal, it appears these classifications have a significant impact on where government money goes.
There is some logic in this. If a regional economy is heavily dependent on the public sector – and those further north are – it makes sense to concentrate support there.
However, judged by where the RGF funds have gone so far, the impoverished north appears to have flexible boundaries, taking in parts of those well-known geographic outposts the West Midlands and the North West (home, of course, to such poverty-stricken sink estates as Birmingham and Manchester).
These classifications are also based on averages, ignoring economic variations within regions. In our case, while Derby has some very powerful and successful global manufacturers like Rolls-Royce, Bombardier and Toyota, Nottingham depends more on services and the public sector.
Neither Nottingham nor Derby are basket cases. Nottingham is on the verge of some substantial investment in retail and transport infrastructure, and the supply chains around Derby are among the best in the world.
But neither are Birmingham nor Manchester. Sure, parts of the regions around them struggle, but so do North Derbyshire and North Nottinghamshire – former coalfield areas which still contain pockets of poverty. So the government has some explaining to do here.
It was pretty obvious from the LEP meeting that it still has some explaining to do with the new Enterprise Zones, too. David Cameron and Nick Clegg came to Nottingham to personally announce that a part of the sprawling Alliance Boots campus was going to become one of the first of these zones, but detail on how it will work remains unclear more than a month after their announcement.
There were vague suggestions that it might be home to a mix of commercial and residential development, while Boots exec Patrick Dunne mentioned the possibility of bringing partners form the health and beauty industry on to the site.
The government is clearly looking for quick progress with Enterprise Zones, which are a key part of its growth agenda. But it may have shot itself in the foot by ripping up the existing government presence at regional level at the same time, thus removing some of the capacity to grab hold of a flagship project at grassroots level, make sense of it and identify the way forward.
Enterprise Zones would have been put in the hands of the East Midlands Development Agency, the Government Office for the East Midlands and UK Trade & Investment. One is going, the other is gone, while UKTI is transferring to a new consultancy.
Among the speakers at the LEP meeting was Maria Lyle, the new assistant director for the government’s Department for Business Innovation & Skills in the East Midlands & South East Midlands. She will be working with Rowena Limb, who has overall charge of BIS’s presence across this ‘region’, and looks likely to be the lead contact around Nottingham.
Her in-tray looks like it’s full of an Enterprise Zone-shaped folder already.