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The Alternative LEP Enterprise Zone

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Enterprise Zones are places where a different set of rules apply to business.  Inside the Enterprise Zone businesses get:

  • business discount rate worth up to £275,000 over five years for firms that move into the area over the course of this parliament
  • a more relaxed, flexible and ‘radically simplified’ planning regime
  • access to ‘superfast’ broadband.*

Enterprise zones will be pockets of the country where the usual rules that govern the relationships between business and society are bent to the advantage of business.  Business will get enhanced public services in the area, and they will pay less for them. Their operating costs will be reduced.  It will be those of us who neither live nor work in an enterprise zone who will pay.  We will be relying on the ‘trickle down fairy’,  trickle down economics to ensure that we all share the success of those who can afford to invest in an enterprise zone.

Enterprise zones ‘work’ (on their own purely economic terms) when they are able to attract more investment.  They attract more investment by reducing the risks and  increasing the rewards for the investors.  We subsidise those investments.

Interestingly the Government is reported to have said that it does not want Enterprise Zones to be about remedying local dereliction but about economic growth.  This is about making public investment where the return on that investment, measured in economic terms, are likely to be greatest.  This means that it is likely to be an investment in already strong economies, helping them to become stronger.

So how might things be different with some #altlep thinking?

In an alternative LEP I think the logic may run a little differently. I think we may question the wisdom of zoning, and instead prefer to think about how we can improve the preconditions of enterprise for all.

We would also make sure that we did nothing that was going to further benefit big business while doing little to help the small businesses that are increasingly the mainstay of our economy.

I think we would think twice before easing planning requirements in certain zones.  Either we have got the planning process right in holding the balance between environment and business or we haven’t.  Or perhaps we should devolve more powers of planning and taxation to the local level so that those who will really be impacted can have a say?

We would recognise that enterprise is expressed in many different voices, not just the voice of business.  We might be interested in setting up a ‘social enterprise zone’.  An area where enterprise is encouraged because of its positive impact on society, not just on the economy.  The mantra might be, ‘yes please make some money if you wish, but make something much more interesting as well, please….’

I think we might question trickle down theory that says ‘a strong economy produces strong public services which in turn produce a strong society’.  While it is true that ‘a rising tide lifts all ships’, in a ‘rising’ economy some people rise much further and much faster than others.  And when the economy sinks, well not all hands sailors share the same risk.

I suspect we would think much more deeply about the psychology of enterprise, the mental barriers to acting boldly in pursuit of dreams, rather than how we can change fiscal and planning policy to encourage those who are already doing it to do it more profitably.  How do we change the psychological landscape so that many more individuals take responsibility for their own lives?  That they feel that it is possible for them to make progress, without waiting for a benevolent employer to come along and offer them a job.

I suspect we would seriously consider the impact of a traditional enterprise zone on its neighbours.  Displacing jobs is not the same as creating as them after all.

Employment and Skills in the Alternative LEP

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  • How do we develop a workforce that is Fit for the Future?
  • How do we tackle the problems of ‘worklessness’?

Important questions that we have sought solutions to for most of my working life.

Broadly speaking we have two possible approaches.  We can  set up a committee of the great and the good, employers, politicians and civil servants and we can task them with collating evidence on labour markets, forecasting the future and identifying practical and affordable opportunities to intervene in the systems of education and worklessness that will make sure we develop the workforce that we need, when we need it.  This centralised approach puts power and resources in the hands of an Employment and Skills Board and sets them an impossible task.  It is the Soviet approach to planning tractor production.  It didn’t work for them.  And it hasn’t worked for us.

This approach results in a relatively small number of experiments (pilots) that are later rolled out.  It relies on a committee to accurately ‘read’ the future – to spot opportunities for job creation and then to exert an influence on the ‘production system’ quickly enough to make a positive difference.  This is usually done by setting targets, shifting resources and waiting to see how things unfold.  Strategies are typically set for perhaps half a decade and ‘refreshed’ annually – single-handedly tackling the worklessness agenda by employing a small army of civil servant and academics to collect data and produce reports.

Such boards end up being an ‘interesting’ balance between the voice of the private sector and democratic accountability.  In fact they usually become a stylized ‘war zones’ from which the private sector often retreats beaten into submission by public sector working practices.  Certainly the voice of the small business sector is rarely effectively heard.

Board strategies usually find a few ‘keys’ (NVQs, Diplomas, accredited in-house training, apprenticeships) to a few kingdoms (construction, health and beauty, tourism, call centres, and anything prefixed with ‘creative’, ‘digital’, ‘bio’, ‘high tech’ or ‘high growth’).  Aspirations and strengths of people are subordinated to the Board’s ideas about future skills needs and ‘opportunities’.  Conformity is valued over originality.  Learning ‘off piste’ becomes tricky.

Alternatively we could radically de-centralise and localise the process of thinking and planning about ‘fitness for the future’.  Instead of relying on an Employer Skills Boards to ‘make things right’ we could lay down a challenge to people to develop the skills and passions that they need to secure an economically viable future for themselves, to find what, for them, is ‘good work‘.  To  find their own contribution.   We could develop enterprising people supported in enterprising communities.  This would need schools and colleges to focus on the learner and their vision for their future rather than on the curriculum or qualification structures.

Such a decentralised, enterprising approach might:

  • enable many more informed brains to be brought to bear on the problem of fitness for the future – academics, industrialists and civil servants do not have a great track record in ‘workforce development’
  • enable people to explore ways of doing what they can do best – and not sub-optimising to conform with the ‘few keys to the few kingdoms’ identified by ‘The Board’
  • encourage the local community to support people in acquiring the skills, experience and work opportunities that they need to flourish economically and socially
  • support people to find learning experiences that help them to become the person that they want to be – rather than to conform with the ideal established by a fallible and distant Board
  • significantly increase the volume of learning experiments in the labour market and enable word of mouth to make sure that we develop a dynamic, flexible, responsive and self-reliant workforce

Perhaps these are not alternatives.  Perhaps we need to develop both strategic and responsive approaches to employment, skills and worklessness in the 21st century.

One thing I am sure of… establishing yet another Employment and  Skills Board (this time for the Leeds City Region) is unlikely to give us a major step forward.