Birmingham Friends of the Earth Action Briefing Feb/Mar 99

West Midlands 1st

This is the battle cry of the business community of the West Midlands as regionalisation fever bites. As environmentalists, we have engaged with the regional agenda for a number of years from making our case at the Examination In Public (EIP) of Regional Planning Guidance for the West Midlands to campaigning against the regional transport programme and raising issues about the wrong sort of houses in the wrong place.

For those of you who remember the old West Midlands County Council: forget it. In European terms and now English terms the West Midlands comprises the unitary authorities of Birmingham, Coventry, Dudley, Herefordshire, Sandwell, Solihull, Stoke on Trent, Telford & The Wrekin, Walsall, Wolverhampton and the two tier counties of Shropshire, Staffordshire, Warwickshire and Worcestershire. The local authorities and local business have been getting their heads round regionalisation in the last few years. Some see it as more bureaucracy while others see it as a massive opportunity. We have established ourselves as a regional player because we avoid it at our peril and also recognise that if we influence the regional level, there is a better chance of winning at the local level. That said, all of our work at the regional level is added value and is not detracting from our local focus.

As far as the wider world is concerned, regionalisation will initially manifest itself in two ways. The formation of a West Midlands Regional Development Agency (RDA) will take over various functions from the Government Office, English Partnerships and the Rural Development Commission and become the driving force for regeneration and development in the region. It will inherit various budgets, staff members and committed projects such as Single Regeneration Budgets from across the West Midlands. There is a great fear that it will see itself as responsible for roads, sheds and ticky tacky houses on greenfield sites with little thought for the wider environmental implications of its activities. The main players in the RDA will be two men: Alex Stevenson and Tony Cassidy. Alex will be Chair of the RDA board comprising 12 other members. He is responsible for Rover Power and Transmission and has recently overseen the transfer of 1000 jobs from Longbridge to Hams Hall. Tony Cassidy will be the Chief Executive and comes south from his current position as Chief Executive of Renfrewshire Enterprise a local part of Scottish Enterprise. So will Silicon Glen also move south with Tony, we ask ourselves?

The RDA, as you can see, is not accountable to anyone, so enter the West Midlands Regional Chamber. This will be local authority led and will be somewhat responsible for overseeing the work of the Agency. One of our successes in the draft RDA Bill was highlighting plans for the RDA's having planning powers similar to those which the well loved Black Country and Heartlands Development Corporations had before their sad demise. We have not been slow to respond to the regionalisation process and have held a number of meetings to discuss the implications for the wider environment. Following on from those initial discussions we held a conference which attracted a wide range of organisations from across the region. We also started to put our heads round a few doors and start some capacity building with other interests from across the region.

To this end we have established the West Midlands Regional Sustainability Forum. The purpose of the forum is to bring together people from across the region and discuss how we can best represent those views at the regional level. One of the first results of this was that we were asked by the Local Government Agency to co-ordinate the environmental organisations representation on the Chamber. We set up a process whereby people from the wider environmental movement could nominate themselves for the one seat on the Chamber which had been set aside for environmental organisations. Gerald Kells from Walsall FOE was successful in that selection process. The first meeting of the Chamber took place in Coventry on 28th January. One environmentalist amongst 42 representatives of local authorities, 9 representatives of the business community and 8 from the wider areas of education, leisure, the social housing and voluntary sectors and the trade unions.

Yes, we want the West Midlands to be first: first to understand the seriousness with which we use natural capital for free and then throw it away without a care of the consequences.

Chris Crean