Where does Heseltine leave our LEP?

The big question about Lord Heseltine's report into regional growth yesterday is whether it will ever become government policy.
It is a proposal to spend money on a grand scale at the grassroots of the economy, and from some angles looks suspiciously like revisiting what organisations like emda and the Government Office for the East Midlands used to do.
Fair enough, it was a government-commissioned report and Lord Heseltine would not have attached his name to it without some commitment from David Cameron and George Osborne to do something with it.
What does George Osborne, the man who holds the purse strings, want to do? Study it in depth. That could mean working out how some of it could be done without it looking like a u-turn, or it could mean kicking it into the long grass.
A sceptical jury is out on which of the two it means.
There is a lot of simple common sense in 'No Stone Unturned', the name Heseltine gave his search for a way of unlocking regional economic growth. Spending money at the grassroots of the economy is best decided at the grassroots, he suggests. But rather than exhuming old quangos and giving them another name he suggests the work could be done by existing bodies - notably the Local Enterprise Partnerships like our own Derbyshire-Nottinghamshire D2N2, and the Chambers of Commerce (which happens to operate across the same turf up here).
More ambitiously, he also suggests councils should be restructured into two tiers (a sort of city and county arrangement), and that civil servants should be reorganised to serve the economy rather than their department. He's taking on vested interest and political turf here, much of which is quite happy to serve itself.
One way or another, our LEP is heading towards a turning point. There will be a review into its future in the spring and it can't come soon enough. With next-to-no budget and a resource of borrowed time, it has failed to make an impact. While Derby has shown signs of believing it could help their economic development efforts, Nottingham has been dismissive - with a £60 million City Deal under its belt, perhaps it feels it can afford to be.
This leaves us wandering into that miserable world of political rivalry between Derby and Nottingham, a sorry turf which acts as nothing more than another bad advert for politics. It surfaced yesterday in the cool reception given to the announcement that the new LEP chair was another Derby business figure, Peter Richardson.
Put to one side the fact that Richardson is a straight-talker who has considerable respect among business across both counties. Nottingham said nothing about his appointment officially, but it is unlikely to be seen as evidence that the LEP gives an equal proportion of its time to both cities. Whether that's a fair assessment or not, it is one Richardson will have to address.
The LEP is being given just enough money by government to establish a full-time secretariat, and it has a hand in one or two major projects. Will next year's review decide how to give it a real sense of purpose? Or will it wonder whether there's any point continuing? Where government goes with the Heseltine report could play a decisive role.