RDAs Hit By Government Funding Cuts

Posted by martinparry on May 26, 2010 under Business Planning, Finance, Grants, Loans, Resources, SME News, Start Ups, Strategic Planning | Comments are off for this article

According to an article in Regen.net The Treasury has announced that England’s regional development agencies will have to save £270 million in the current financial year through “ending lower value spending”.

Setting out how the coalition government intends to save £6.2 billion in 2010/11, chief secretary to the Treasury David Laws said that RDAs will “have to cut back on spending which has the lowest economic impact”.

A document published by the Treasury following the announcement said that the budget for the RDAs would have to provide £270 million of savings in 2010/11 “from ending lower value spending”.

Laws said: “Tough decisions are being made … Quangos across government will have to make major savings in their budgets.”

A spokeswoman for the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills said that no decisions had been made yet on how the cuts would be spread across England’s nine RDAs.

But speaking in Warrington last week, new business secretary Vince Cable picked out the South-East England Development Agency (Seeda) and the East of England Development Agency (Eeda) as examples of RDAs whose existence is hard to justify.

Cable was quoted by the Financial Times as saying: “It is very difficult to see the justification for RDAs in the South-East and East, prosperous regions with a large private sector.

“There are areas like the North-West, Yorkshire and the West Midlands, where there are really serious structural problems and there seems to be a broad agreement with local businesses that the RDAs are doing a good job.”

Sc: www.regen.net Sc: www.ukba.co.uk