Some interesting comments were made about Local Enterprise Partnerships at our last meeting. If you have experience or knowledge of them, we would love to hear from you.

Some comments about LRPs from the last meeting:

“Just to summarise what I said in the meeting about LEPs

The Local Enterprise Partnerships are a “left-over” from the old regional planning system. Under the Blair government, each region had a Regional Assembly (which was initially made up of local councillors, but was eventually intended to be elected) and a Regional Development Agency, which allocated a pot of government funds to infrastructure and regional-promotion projects. The whole system was scrapped in 2010 when the Coalition came to power, and the LEPs were introduced as a voluntary replacement. Originally they carried no public funding, with the idea that they would facilitate local businesses and local authorities to work together. In 2012, the government changed its mind and allocated a pool of money for LEPs to spend. They also help to channel European money (where that’s available) into the right region.

Looking at the LEP Network website, there appears to be something called the “Sustainable Transport Delivery Project” which specifically relates to funding to help the cost-effective delivery of active travel projects like cycle routes. This appears to be consultancy rather than actual hard cash for the project, but worth knowing. Details here:
http://www.lepnetwork.net/key-activities/transport/“