Are we about to lose our voice in Whitehall?

You may neither know nor care what the Nottingham-based East Midlands Development Agency is or does.
And even if you are familiar with it, you might be among those who think that Government agencies with £160m-a-year budgets should go and get a dose of the real world.
But what would you think if someone suggested that a body that has played a key role in driving through some of the most significant developments in Nottingham’s economy should be axed?
And how would you feel if someone said that the region Nottingham is part of was going to lose its influence in the corridors of power?
If Government changes, there’s every possibility that could happen to Emda and its 277 staff.
So are they worth hanging on to?
If you don’t know it, Emda was set up 10 years ago to try to put some focus into the long-term growth of the economy in a region which suffers two fundamental problems: a weak identity, and a tendency to indulge in the kind of partisan political in-fighting last seen before the demise of Yugoslavia.
So this was no easy task.
At the time there was little centralised knowledge about what the East Midlands economy was beyond a general awareness of key sectors and big businesses.
So Emda gathered some statistical data, identified where the opportunities for growth were and, to make it understandable, said we should become one of the top 20 regions in Europe by 2010.
Why do we actually need a regional strategy? Because businesses don’t stop at city or county boundaries – their markets tend to be regional or national, so are the chains of companies they work with. An economic strategy based only on political boundaries ignores the way the local economy actually operates.
When Toyota decided to build a car factory at Burnaston it wasn’t just good news for Derby – people from Notts work there, companies based in the county do business with it. Indeed, Toyota has built a training academy in Nottingham.
And the man who currently chairs the East Midlands Development Agency is not a civil servant who has never stepped beyond his desk. He is Bryan Jackson [pictured above], the former boss of Toyota in the UK.
Five minutes in Bryan Jackson’s company is five minutes with a business high-flyer who wants to do only one thing: get on with the job. A faceless civil servant he ain’t.
There is another point: it isn’t clear exactly what the alternatives to Emda is.
How about handing over its powers to the Government Office for the East Midlands? It could do statistical work, but Government Offices (originally set up by the Tories, incidentally) are mainly here to keep tabs on what councils and health authorities get up to in the Government’s name.
Neither am I sure that it would save much money: quite a few Emda people are ex-Government Office staffers, so they may simply transfer back to their old payroll if that happened.
How about councils then? Some are better than others, but most lack the skills and ‘big picture’ vision necessary to make large scale decision about strategic investment.
They’re also naturally biased to their own patch and their own political priorities, which is at the heart of some of the seemingly infantile squabbling they get up to. Witness the frayed relationship between Nottinghamshire County Council and Nottingham City Council, the uneasy peace between Derby, Nottingham and Leicester, and different economic initiatives in different cities which appear to promote the same thing.
Publicly, councils will tell you they don’t mind where investment goes as long as the East Midlands benefits. Privately, they want the glory for themselves - that’s politics.
But both business – and, frankly, government – tends to walk away when this internecine warfare goes too far.
So there appears to be a plausible argument for maintaining some kind of structure that understands the dynamics of the wider East Midlands economy and knows how to hook them up to the decision-makers in Whitehall.
Up in the North East, they’ve already cottoned on to that, with a campaign underway to preserve their own RDA, One North East. Some are cool on the organisation, but they don’t want to lose the voice it gives them.
Will the East Midlands do the same? Next year’s election is almost certain to be in May. We have only a few months to make up our minds.