Member Article

North East must prepare for Scottish independence

Entrepreneur Jeremy Middleton says the North East must replace ‘begging bowl’ culture with a spirit of enterprise to prepare for competitiveness with a devolved Scotland.

Business Angel Mr Middleton is set address the NECC’s AGM, where he will say the region must develop a list of strong ideas to prepare for the prospect of Scotland being awarded more powers.

Speaking also as a board member of the North Eastern Local Enterprise Partnership, he remarked: “When the Government decides to give more powers to Scotland we need to be ready with out list of ideas to protect our economy.

“Our future depends on burying the begging bowl and creating the confidence that will encourage our people to learn, to train, to risk and to invest.

“It’s my view that the LEP must show leadership to support this message.”

Mr Middleton is also set to highlight the LEP’s role in developing strategies and ideas, particularly in addressing much needed growth in the private sector, a change of attitude from dependence to enterprise and challenging the banks on volume of their lending, and on their terms and conditions.

“The LEP needs to keep up the pressure to push enterprise in everything it does and everything its partners do. We need to promote a ‘can do’ culture in our schools, in our further and higher education institutions and in our communities,” he will add.

He believes the LEP should have a role in leading the cultural shift to enterprise, championing our region in Whitehall, prioritising and securing extra investment in our infrastructure and economic assets, building the funding available for our businesses, focusing marketing of the region to inward investors and tourists, focusing education and skills on producing needed skills and delivering pan local authority projects, like the enterprise zone.

He will add: “It must be the LEP’s role to pull together the private sector interests and the local authority specialists to agree what infrastructure investment is needed, and to prioritise.

“Business needs to lead on where resources should be spent. This isn’t something exclusively for our seven Local Authority partners to divide up to appease their electorates.

“These decisions should be based on what will deliver the maximum economic impact - and the LEP is best-placed to make these calls.”

Mr Middleton will also dismiss the notion that there is no money available to invest in infrastructure, and will point out the Government has announced a range of new projects and that finance is available via Regional Growth fund Round three, and the European Regional Development and Growing Places Funds.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Tom Keighley .