When the South West Regional Development Agency is laid to rest sometime next year it will be welcomed by enlightened business men with good riddance of an overstuffed bureaucracy which has spent such huge sums of taxpayers' money to deliver so little.
Its death will see the South West will be relieved of a huge, ponderous juggernaut of an agency which has swallowed up more cash than bears thinking about as it has attempted to deliver economic advancement to a region which has singularly lagged behind the rest of the country for generations. And which, for all the spending, continues to do so.
The RDAs were an example of Labour's "joined-up government" but in this case it joined up an entirely artificial region. The top end – most of upper Gloucestershire – regards itself as being more part of the Midlands than the South West and most people who live there regard the bottom end as a holiday destination rather than a part of the socio-economic unit they inhabit.
The two extremes have never been regarded as part of one and the same region until Labour ministers got their pocket diaries out, turned to the map and saw that Gloucester was only an inch and a half from Penzance and concluded the South West could thus be packaged up into a single economic unit.
When you consider that the eastern extremity of this "region" is closer to Dover than it is to St Ives it becomes easy to understand the folly of this decision.
People at one end of the South West have nothing in common with those at the other. Yet the RDA, during its mercifully short life, has attempted to impose the same yardstick policies across the entire, sprawling territory.
If history has shown us one thing it is that the larger an organisation is the easier it is to mask inefficiencies, deficiencies and failings. And to spend money wastefully.
Of course, if you decide to spend £50,000 on a party to promote the delights of the South West, or more than £30,000 sending a group of staff off on a jolly to the French Riviera it's easy to justify it by pointing out that it is only a fraction of one per cent of your annual budget. But the fact remains that in a smaller organisation with a more modest budget it would be unthinkable to dispense sums of this kind on promotional events which have no measurable outcome.
The RDA has a far from unblemished record when it comes to choosing where and how to direct its financial support.
We have read far too much about wildly speculative projects which have won official backing, only to crash spectacularly.
We have shovelled obscene sums into the RDA and the region is no better off for it. Its running costs have been huge, much of its support misguided, its track record questionable, to put it as kindly as I possibly can.
So let us see how Vince Cable’s Local Partnerships fare. They can’t do a worse job.
Author: Chris Slay
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