Good broadband is a ‘crucial’ issue

By Sarah Chambers
Tuesday, April 12, 2011
11:54 AM

The government’s enterprise minister yesterday acknowledged the issue of good broadband was “a crucial one” in counties such as Norfolk as he met with members of the region’s new enterprise partnership for the first time to talk about priorities for growth.

Mark Prisk, minister for business and enterprise in the Department for Business Innovation and Skills, met with the New Anglia Local Enterprise Partnership (LEP) delegation in Ipswich.

Business leaders in Norfolk and Suffolk have been fighting hard to get broadband improvements for the county, including through the EDP’s Broadband, Back the Bid campaign.

In a roundtable discussion, Mr Prisk discussed with businesses how to drive growth locally, particularly through the energy and tourism sectors.

“Instead of having large regional quangos driven by what happens in Whitehall, we are forming LEPs,” he said. “In the past, Cambridge and Suffolk were all lumped together with Hertfordshire and it has been one size fits all but the priorities here are very different to the priorities in Watford.”

A pot of £550m had been set aside by the government for “plugging gaps” in broadband delivery where commercial bodies won’t take it on “so we can actually help areas like Suffolk, Norfolk and so on where you have got areas that are isolated and link them up to the internet”, he said. “What you guys have to do is to decide how you roll that out,” he said.

The government would be giving out funding “tranches” to successful bidders and was inviting bids for broadband improvements from counties across the UK, he said.

“What we are intending to do is enable them to put together a bid in a way that works for them,” he said. “They may say actually what we need at the moment is a £5m tranche to get us to the next step.”

The government was also inviting LEPs to put forward bids for creating enterprise zones, he said. Eleven of the 21 zones, which will benefit from superfast broadband connections among other things, have already been announced. “We want this area to grow,” he said.

Getting rid of red tape barriers is one of the ways the government is hoping to help businesses achieve that, he said. A “rebalancing” will be needed in towns such as Ipswich, where there are a large number of public sector workers, he acknowledged.

His comments came as the LEP faced criticism over the appointment of business representatives to the organisation’s governing board, due to be announced.

Chris Soule, the FSB’s Suffolk chairman said an undertaking had been given last autumn that the panel responsible for the election process would include representatives from groups including, among others, the Chambers, the FSB and the IoD.

He also disagreed with the level of involvement of the British Chambers of Commerce involvement in the LEP governance, especially it running a new group designed to give LEPs a national voice.

A spokesman for New Anglia responded by saying the selection process had been agreed by the LEP’s development group, which included a representative from the FSB and that it had “been and was independent, rigorous and transparent”.

Norfolk and Suffolk miss out on growth fund cash – Page 1.