Why Alistair should write a cheque for enterprise

By Neil Foster / @neilrfoster

Where should you go to find the creators of a self-timing watering device to keep your plants healthy when you’re on holiday? What about a range of equipment for children to safely play with their pets? Similarly if you see on the market a talking mirror providing motivational messages in the morning, you’ll have a group of 11-year-old school children in the North East of England to thank.

I recently glimpsed this future of British business in a secondary school in Cramlington in Northumberland when volunteering for the far-sighted charity Young Enterprise. While working alongside Year 7 students over two months we considered what it meant to be enterprising, which of their skills need to be deployed at which stages of a product’s development and how to best market their exciting ideas. The activities were engaging and the school-learning environment was outstanding. The beautifully designed £11 million building was financed by a Labour council and a Labour Government. It couldn’t have been more different from the ageing Portakabins I learnt in while growing up under the Tories.

The exciting conclusion I left the Cramlington Junior Learning Village with was that there clearly is no shortage of budding entrepreneurs. That’s the hard part cracked. If backed up with the right support these young people have a great chance to fulfill their potential in whatever direction they choose and create good quality jobs along the way. The opportunity agenda cannot be confined to the young. The worldwide recession is precisely the time for people of all ages to draw on their experience and ideas to help build a resilient new economy.

Up the road from Cramlington lies Ashington. It is a famous town built by coal and is recovering from the industrial onslaught of Thatcherism by investing in what is its biggest natural resource – the people. ‘Go Wansbeck’ is a successful model that has been assisting new businesses and helping existing firms grow and relocate here since 2006. It is part of the Government’s Local Enterprise Growth Initiative (LEGI) whose funds are invested in areas that often have limited entrepreneurial heritage and relatively high levels of economic deprivation. The early results are exciting. From supporting new solar energy companies to expanding firms digitally producing ceramics, the modern face of manufacturing can now be found here.

Down by the River Tyne, Labour’s elected Mayor John Harrison is seeking re-election this June. He is pushing ahead with progressive policies firmly promoting jobs and enterprise. As well as an ambitious plan to rollout free broadband across North Tyneside, he is committed to ringfencing a significant portion of the council’s procurement budget to contract with local firms and social enterprises. The New Economics Foundation recognises the value of this approach. They argue that the wealth of local economies leak like water in holed-buckets, as spending power is diminished by people and firms based outside of the locality in which they operate. The solution is to lock-in local spending for as long as possible to provide a ‘local multiplier effect’. This way money can effectively be spent many times over within the same local economy. Mayor Harrison’s plans will have a significant regenerating impact in North Tyneside requiring no more investment other than bold political leadership.

The North East may historically lag in a range of employment and enterprise indicators, but these three distinctly Labour approaches are working well to change that. Together they should gives us pride in what Labour has achieved so far, highlight what is still at stake and encourage Gordon Brown and Alistair Darling to go further still. The world recession is precisely the right time to push ahead with greater measures for enterprise so that the UK is first out of the starting blocks during the recovery. We can only do this through a range of creative business support services and policies firmly based on opportunity and equality.

So what would I like to see in the 2009 Budget to achieve this? Labour should commit to a Post Bank as part of a wholly publicly owned Royal Mail that can confidently provide finance to firms independently of banks caught up in the credit crunch. The creation of a nationally funded Research and Development Service would provide cost-effective ideas and answers to those small businesses without full-time staff to identify and enter emerging new markets. Funding for LEGIs should be extended and broadened to other geographical areas too.

The Tory alternative to all this is to do nothing and allow Labour’s valuable initiatives fade away. Under George Osborne business growth would rely on the ‘old boy network’ or membership of the right golf club. Start up funding in difficult times will largely be confined to those with access to inheritance or family wealth. A Cameron Government would actively intervene in just one area – undermining workers’ rights at work through pulling us out of the European Social Chapter. This is a miserable cost-cutting agenda where people are seen as the part of the problem and not the solution.

Four decades ago Robert Kennedy argued that ‘the future will be shaped in the arena of human activity, by those willing to commit their minds and their bodies to the task.’ On Wednesday I want to see Alistair Darling’s Labour Budget unleash the potential of private and social entrepreneurs in the recovery from recession. Equalising access to enterprise is good for jobs, a catalyst for regeneration and can make our regions stronger. In particular we owe those areas still scarred by the destructive actions of last Tory Government the privilege of writing their own future. If we get this right, the young people I met in Blyth Valley will have no need for talking motivational mirrors. They will be encouraged and enthused by all those around them who are rebuilding a successful economy in which we can all share.