Paper Titles & Abstracts

European funding streams are delivered through 7 year rolling programmes. The UK government and the EU are consulting on wide ranging reforms for 2014-20 including combining structural funds into a common strategic framework (CSF). In the past in England programmes have been managed through the standard English regions by partnerships made up of central and local government, regional development agencies (RDAs), third sector partners and other stakeholders. The abolition of RDAs in 2010 led to a partial renationalisation of the administration of structural funds. From the latter half of 2012 the Government has been consulting about the management of structural funds in the next programme. It has been suggested that there are differences between Departments with Communities and Local Government(DCLG) seeking a localist solution through the new Local enterprise partnerships (LEPs) while the Business Department (BIS) wishes to centralise control. This paper will look at the issues of managing programmes at a local level and suggest that the devolution to LEPs is a double edged sword carrying with it the probability that fragmentation will lead to greater not less centralisation and raising questions about the acceptability to the commission of structures below NUTS II levels. It will argue that counter-intuitively the true localist solution would be for LEPs to come together in larger groupings to enable impact, scale and flexibility to exist in their programmes and potentially allow the delegation of additional functions.