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BUSINESS leaders in Liverpool have thrown their weight behind calls for a massive cut in the bureaucracy facing the city’s entrepreneurs.
The Merseyside Entrepreneurship Commission, which launched its final report earlier today, has called for one lead business support agency to help small businesses launch and grow in Liverpool.
And according to private sector champion Downtown Liverpool In Business, there is no single measure which could better enhance the city’s business economy.
“This is exactly what the city needs more than anything else,” said DLIB chairman Frank McKenna, who has been campaigning for a wholesale purge in the number of government agencies in the city for more than 12 months.
“For more than a year, we have been using our Liverpool One campaign to lobby for a cut in the huge number of local government bodies, regeneration agencies and quangos strangling the city’s business community.
“Liverpool desperately needs its government to be streamlined and re-organised, and creating a single business support agency would certainly be a step in the right direction.”
While welcoming its major finding, Mr McKenna said the city’s businesses still had some reservations about the commission.
“Obviously it is good news that the MEC is backing our call for fewer agencies, but I’m afraid that the fact that it has cost more than a quarter of a million pounds of public money means it cannot be whole-heartedly applauded.
“The MEC launched its research around the same time that DLIB was formed 18 months ago.
“Yet while we – having consulted with our members - have been campaigning on this issue since Autumn 2004, only now has the MEC come to the same conclusion.
“If Liverpool gets fewer bureaucrats as a result, then fine, but why has it taken 18 months and £250,000 or more to achieve?
“If the MEC really wanted to earn the backing of Liverpool business, it needed to be far more efficient and businesslike – not ponderous and wasteful as this report would suggest.
“But the biggest shame is that, instead, the MEC is now being wound up, leaving no accountability or feedback.”
The MEC was set up by the Government Office North West, and was administered by Merseyside Chambers of Commerce using funding from the region’s Objective One programme.
Note to editors
For more information, or to arrange an interview with Frank McKenna, call Chris Marritt at Mason Media on 0151 707 4514 or 07908 214950.
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