Heseltine's wake-up call for LEPs

It only seems like yesterday that the East Midlands Development Agency closed its doors (only for a load of civil servants to walk in through the back and do something which bears a vague resemblance to some of its work).
Anyway, here we are four months on and Lord Heseltine is announcing proposals which also bear a startling resemblance to things regional development agencies used to do, putting tens of billions of government money in the hands of local organisations and devolving decision-making to local level.
What on earth is going on?
Well, some pigeons are coming home to roost for one thing. The coalition government's decision to scrap all of England's nine regional development agencies was the kind of one-size-fits-all politics which flew in the face of well-established regional variations in the economy.
It assumed, too, that all RDAs were an expensive waste of space. As Ken Clarke privately admitted even before the election, they were not. The RDAs in the north west, south and south west did not cover themselves in glory. Ours, however, grew into something professional and well-run. And the RDAs in Yorkshire and the North East made a vital contribution to their economies.
Whatever the government's numbers may tell us, it is questionable whether any money was really saved by closing them. Besides the costs of getting rid of people and unwinding contracts in some RDAs, these agencies contained valuable expertise about regional economies and an ability to get funding out into the economy (something this government has made a real horlicks of). This valuable asset was allowed to walk out of the door.
Government's theory was that local economies should be weaned off the state spoon and learn to stand on their own two feet. The first sign that this theory was wildly idealistic surfaced when Lord Heseltine (yes, him again) came up with the Regional Growth Fund, an acknowledgment that putting money into pump-priming business growth at regional level might not be such a daft idea after all.
We also had the emergence of Local Enterprise Partnerships, an attempt to encourage business to get involved in initiatives which might help develop their local economies.
And, of course, we've had a team of civil servants responsible for monitoring and advising on the implementation of government policy at regional level taking over the offices formerly occupied by emda.
Now, the eagle-eyed among you might just have spotted a bit of a theme here: organisations and initiatives involved in developing the economy at something other than a national level. We won't say regional because, of course, that has all stopped.
Sort of.
Let's stop being facetious for a minute. Lord Heseltine's announcement today is a big issue for Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire. The brutal truth is that its Local Enterprise Partnership. D2N2, has struggled to make any kind of meaningful impression where it counts. It isn't the go-to organisation for business, councils don't rate it, MPs never mention it and Whitehall wonders what's happened to it.
LEPs were always going to struggle to gain traction because they had a budget around about the size of a packet of KP ready-salted. Yet some have managed to persuade local authorities they were worth backing (Northants got its hands on £2 million). The view is that D2N2 and others have failed to establish any authority.
Lord Heseltine's proposals suggest this needs to happen fast. He has clearly identified these organisations as a route through which government money could be channelled into regional economies. This is a major opportunity, therefore, for a business-led organisation to be in the forefront of investment decisions about their own economies.
D2N2 now has to demonstrate that it can grasp this opportunity and work with city and county councils in Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire to get a fair share of the cash. This hasn't happened so far with the Regional Growth Fund (where the money the East Midlands got was way below other regions).
So D2N2 and our local politicians have some ground to make up.
Lord Heseltine's announcement suggests that government has effectively admitted that the work RDAs did was not a totally unaffordable waste of time, and that city regions can and should be real engines for growth.
Nottingham and Derby have an unfortunate and inglorious history of letting small-town political rivalry get in the way of grown-up cooperation. The view in business is that they need to get over themselves.
While Lord Heseltine's report represents a potentially big opportunity it is also a political headache. Coverage in the national newspapers today has offered an insight into the political nonsenses the report faces: not for the first time, the Guardian went into full-on 'challenge to the prime minister' mode, The Times - bizarrely - suggested the report's most significant finding was about Heathrow airport, the Telegraph reported the politics but not the detail.
Yet in doing so they more or less made Heseltine's point for him: an awful Westminster-centric myopia - there for all to see in the online era - has left political decision-making increasingly distant and increasingly irrelevant to regional priorities.
In other words, we have to grab what we can.