Enterprise Partnership offers progress report

Entitled Our Achievements, the report reinforces the Lancashire Enterprise Partnership’s track record in securing private and public sector investment to drive growth, to create new jobs and improve the county’s infrastructure.

It includes details of how the LEP has, in five years, delivered over £1bn of transformational economic programmes across Lancashire which have kick-started more than 50 major growth initiatives.

These projects are helping to support the county’s 50,000 businesses who generate almost £28bn per year,.

These include the £450M Preston, South Ribble and Lancashire City Deal, £320M in Growth Deal allocations, Boost, the business growth hub, The Lancashire Advanced Manufacturing and Energy Cluster programme, based on three enterprise zones, a major innovation programme anchored by three leading universities – Lancaster, UCLan and Edge Hill and the £20M Growing Places Investment Fund.

The report also clearly sets out the organisation’s priorities and targets for the future.

This includes an overarching objective to halve the county’s Gross Value Added performance gap with the rest of the UK whilst increasing the number of high value jobs.

Other commitments include ‘making Lancashire the preferred place to invest driven by agility and competitiveness’, ‘creating a long-term growth environment that is compelling to new international investors’ and ‘driving and enabling the development of local talent, matched to economic opportunities’.

See also: £7m facelift for roads