Tuesday 2 November 2010

Lancashire has no local enterprise partnership

How do you decide natural political boundaries? Well they could fall within geographical boundaries like Lancashire, but Lancashire didn't get any local enterprise partnerships when three bids from the north west were not good enough last week. One was called Pennine Lancashire - whatever that means and one was from Blackpool Wyre and Fylde and the other was from the Lancashire County Council.

There are signs that distinguish Lancashire from everywhere else because it is a place where everyone matters. I am not clear why Blackpool should be independent of the rest of Lancashire but there is obviously a case for this boundary. If that is the case then we could be looking at independence for any local area.

One spokesperson said that the economic geography of Lancashire is not very neat and it makes no sense for Lancashire to organise itself as a functionl economic area. It seems that anyone who knows the area will recognise that The answer, according to this person was that there are three areas, possibly two, that have a functioning economic area.

This all seems pretty vague to me. I sort of know the Lancashire boundaries even if you do take away places like Blackpool and Blackburn. How you then decide that the economic geography falls into two or three just sounds artificial. Maybe if all of these groups did work together we could have a local enterprise partnership.

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