UK government to cut funding for RDAs
The UK government is next week set to announce large-scale budget cuts for regional development agencies across the UK. Business Secretary Vince Cable suggested as much in a speech this week amid signs that the current government is not wholly convinced about the benefits attributed to regional development agencies across the country.
It seems as though the UK government is looking to replace regional government agencies with an array of local enterprise partnerships which it believes will offer better value for money going forward. When you consider the budget for the nine regional development agencies in the UK was £2.3 billion last year there may be some potentially large savings for the government to make.
The reduction in budgets for regional development agencies is just the first in a long line of initiatives set to be announced by the UK government over the coming weeks. There was an accusation sometime back that these regional development agencies were being used as some kind of political weapon by the former government. The truth is that whether investment in regional government agencies is reduced, and the agencies replaced by enterprise partnerships, there is a great need for investment into local economies in many areas of the UK with the North probably more in need than anywhere else.
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