THERE has been confusion over the creation of the successors to the regional development agencies.

This has been caused by vague and contradictory messages from the new Government, as well as by the inevitable uncertainties that come from people trying to work out a new policy.

We seem now to be getting somewhere and, broadly, the North-East will like its new shape.

It doesn’t really want to lose One North East, but it seems that the Government will now allow some regionwide strategic body to remain, which is important.

One of the biggest criticisms of One North East, particularly in its early days, was that the Tees Valley felt peripheral. So the Government is giving the sub-region a Local Enterprise Partnership (LEP) of its own.

Rather than split the north of the region into five awkwardly-shaped LEPs, the Government is now accepting that it can form a single partnership.

So, in the spirit of compromise, the Government can claim that it has broken up the region, but the region has avoided being fractured into competing fragments.

Not everyone could be kept happy – north Northumberland might find itself feeling peripheral, as might north North Yorkshire in the City of Leeds LEP – but it does look as if the Government has listened.

However, these structures will be irrelevant if the LEPs turn out to be talking shops with no powers and no money.

In fact, they will be worse than that if it transpires that many of the regional development agency’s responsibilities, including the handling of European money, have been taken back up to distant Whitehall, rather than handed down to the local communities.