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Agenda item

Gloucestershire Economic Growth Scrutiny Committee

To receive an update from the Council’s representative on matters considered at the last meeting (16 September 2020). 

Minutes:

27.1          The Council’s representative on the Gloucestershire Economic Growth Scrutiny Committee (GEGSC) presented the report, circulated with the Agenda at Pages No. 55-62, which contained a summary of the Committee’s last meeting held on 16 September together with a number of links which would enable Members full access to the documents/presentations and links to YouTube to watch the Joint Economic Growth Scrutiny Committee (JEGSC).

27.2          The Council’s representative explained that his report was broken down into five parts: the work plan; Joint Economic Growth Scrutiny Committee (JEGSC) Update; Business Rates Pool; Broadband; and GFirst LEP Update. Workplan: The Committee discussed items for inclusion in its October and November 2020 work plan and Page No. 55 set out the detail of the items considered for inclusion. JEGSC Update: The Chair of that Committee reported on what had happened at the meeting earlier in the day which included an update on the cyber central development at the Golden Valley which boasted a central and well connected position within the country with a location ranking for cyber specialisation considered to be at “number one” and it was emphasised that Cyber Central was a huge development opportunity not just for Cheltenham but for the whole of Gloucestershire and the South West of England. The Council’s representative indicated that he felt the marketing materials for this site were rather good and he had provided links for the Committee to view them in full. The meeting also considered Gloucestershire’s Economic Recovery Plan and the point that kept being made was that nobody really knew what it was the County was recovering from particularly with the furlough scheme and other government subsidies masking potential problems. The COVID-19 situation was incredibly fluid and therefore the plan needed to be adaptable and responsive. Reference was made to the overall approach that the County was following utilising the 3 Cs of Collaboration, Communication and Confidence with, initially, the Senior Officer Group agreeing that the focus would be on skills, visitor economy and joint lobbying. The plan included a short-term, medium-term and long-term target for each of those areas but, following a prompt by a Committee Member, it was agreed that short-term deadlines would attempt to be assigned to the various events in the plan. Business Rates Pool: The Council’s representative indicated that he had found the presentation on this matter really interesting as it was something he had been unaware of previously. The presentation covered how the business rates pool had done between 2019 and 2020, how the pandemic had affected the business rates pool in the current year and what the future was for business rates pooling. In terms of how the pool had done between 2019 and 2020, the total growth over the given baseline across Gloucestershire was £19.4 million. The gain from pooling as opposed to not pooling was the levy amount which was saved as it did not get returned to central government and over the period that gain was £4.85 million - the pooling gain was shared between the County Council, the Strategic Economic Development Fund and the District Councils based on the Business Rates Pool Agreement which had been signed at the start of the process. The impact of COVID-19 on the Business Rates Pool had been quite unusual in that it had provided greater certainty that central government had agreed to pay the business rates of those sectors severely impacted by COVID-19 and therefore there was a reduction in risk in terms of non-payment. Overall, the impact was negligible, and the most recent monitoring suggested that the gain would be similar to last year which had been a particularly good year. Looking to the future of Business Rates Pooling, for some time now the government had planned to redistribute growth around the country from those areas that had experienced it to those areas that had not in order to even things up. Accordingly, if there was no growth in Gloucestershire, the benefit of pooling would be lost and therefore it had been agreed to investigate this risk to pooling and report back later in the year. Broadband: An update on the Fastershire Broadband Infrastructure Programme was provided and the Chair of the JEGSC maintained that good progress had been made and the programme had been successful with all areas being covered by 2022. GFirst LEP Update: A brief overview of the latest project pipeline information was provided together with quarter one performance data. The importance of maintaining capital investment projects that could release economic growth was stressed as at any time the government could release additional funding for such projects. It was explained that the process of selecting projects for submission to government was based on a standard set of criteria together with additional criteria that was tailored to a specific funding opportunity. However, Members of the Gloucestershire Economic Growth Scrutiny Committee (EGSC) felt that they did not have sufficient information to be able to properly scrutinise why certain projects were accepted for submission to the government and others were not. It was felt that much more information was needed on the scoring matrix and the criteria used by the Local Enterprise Partnership (LEP) when submitting projects for a particular funding opportunity. On this basis, the LEP representative had agreed to look at what additional information could be provided so that scrutiny could be undertaken.

27.3          In thanking the Council’s representative for his update, the Chair indicated that the representative from the LEP had now responded to the EGSC’s request; much more detailed information on formulas and criteria would be made available in future but obviously sensitive financial information would continue to be protected.

27.4          It was

RESOLVED           That the Gloucestershire Economic Growth Scrutiny Committee Update be NOTED.

Supporting documents: