Stewart Jackson said last week that RDAs would be abolished under a Tory government and their funding handed instead to elected local mayors. On the other hand his colleague the Shadow Chancellor George Osborne, in a speech to the Local Government Association said that the Tories would devolve RDA funds to local authorities and local businesses.

These contradictory statements on the future of the RDAs are examples in a long line of statements that have variously suggested that they would all be abolished and their powers given to groups of local authorities, only some of them would be abolished, they would be retained but refocussed, retained but stripped of their planning powers or just generally slimmed down.

Even Stewart Jackson’s hard line stance was softened by the suggestion that one of the RDAs, understood to be One North-East, could be retained and exist as a local enterprise partnership.

The divide in Conservative opinion would appear to split between local government and business departments with the former being abolitionist and the latter being rather more conciliatory. Conservative leader David Cameron leans more to the conciliatory side but has also said that he would scrap the south east’s RDA - SEEDA - while keeping some of the others.

It seems that the LibDems are also opposed to RDAs and their economics spokesperson – Vince Cable – also announced last week that he would close them down.

Meanwhile the first report of the House of Commons south east regional committee has pointed out that the south east RDA – SEEDA – gets less money than any other RDA and more should be channelled its way to be invested in the region, rather than heading to northern regions.

The Committee argues that the returns will be greater by investing in the “successful” economy of the south east because it would result in greater productivity, which would generate more taxes, which could then be invested elsewhere.

Perhaps understandably, the leader of Newcastle City Council – John Shipley – was quick to disagree.

ECONOMIC PARTNERSHIP COMMENT

The Brighton & Hove Economic Partnership has to declare an interest; it is funded by the South East England Development Agency (SEEDA). Having said that, the clamour to close down RDAs would appear to be entirely budgetary since their core activities – essentially spatial & economic planning and business support – clearly have a value (especially in times of recession). But the Conservatives and the Lib Dems both appear to think that other arrangements could achieve better outcomes for less money.

The nine RDAs in the region cost the Treasury £2.3bn p.a. but they have already been forced to focus and trim their activities by virtue of the government’s raid on their budgets to fund a new homes initiative (which is largely considered to have been a failure).

It is (unhelpfully) unclear what a new Conservative government would do with RDAs or, more to the point, the functions that they currently fulfil. However, of the suggestions that they have put forward which largely revolve around giving the RDA functions to a greater number of much smaller bodies, it is difficult to see how this will save money or be more efficient. Indeed the last report from the National Audit Office two years ago said that all nine of the RDAs were performing either well or strongly and SEEDA was praised for its partnership working, which suggests that they deliver good value for money. Balanced against this a report from the EEF found that they could do better (see earlier story)

The often contradictory messages that the Conservatives are sending out about the future of the RDAs and their rather woolly ideas for replacing them would indicate that the party hasn’t really thought through their policies on economic development.