ENABLING BUSINESSES AS THE DRIVERS OF GROWTH: BUSINESS SUPPORT SIMPLIFICATION PROGRAMME AND THE CORE CITIES
by Catherine Garnell, Executive Policy Manager, Liverpool City Council
In recent years our work with businesses across our cities has identified a consistent plea for a simpler more accessible and better understood landscape of support for business. Given the current economic climate it is even more imperative that we work to create the conditions in which the private sector can create wealth and prosperity. Through Liverpool’s work on the regional Business Support Simplification Programme (BSSP) Steering Group, the Core Cities have been working to support the continuing processes of simplifying business support to ensure the best possible service to business.
Through this process, the Core Cities have been engaging with the Department for Business Enterprise and Regulatory Reform (BERR) and the Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills (DIUS).
The Core Cities are keen to align enterprise and business support activities with the new national BSSP menu in the context of ensuring effective solution tailored to the needs of the cities’ communities and businesses. Increasing business take- up of new information and communication technologies has been identified as critical to higher levels of innovation.
Through its Innovation and Business Support Workstream, the Core Cities Group is working with Business Link to ensure local businesses have the service and support they deserve. Some good progress has been made on city and regional innovation policies, especially on the improvement of university-business links. But the organisational structures around business and innovation support have become too fragmented – confusing businesses and making policy co-ordination more difficult.
The Core Cities Group will continue working with key agencies and our higher education partners to tackle the wider barriers to innovation in our economies in areas like transport, housing and planning; and look to rationalise organisational structures and plug innovation policy back into the mainstream economic growth agenda.