Helen Golightly has served as Chief Executive of the North East Local Enterprise Partnership since 2015, and has worked with the LEP since 2012. She also served as interim CEO of the North East Combined Authority from 2016-2019. Before joining the LEP, Helen spent two decades across various roles in planning and economic regeneration for Newcastle City Council.
This interview was conducted on 5 October 2021.
Q: Could you tell us about your role in growth and regional policy over the past few decades? What have been the main successes and frustrations during your time working in this field?
I’m the chief executive of the North East Local Enterprise Partnership, which I joined in early 2012, just as it was getting established. I was one of three early appointments and became chief executive in 2015. I was also the chief executive of the North-East Combined Authority from 2016 to 2019 – for a three year period I did both roles, which I’m sure will come out in some of my answers. Before that, I was in a local government for 23 years, particularly in regeneration, economic development, planning, but also corporate strategy for local authorities. My background is very much from a local authority perspective, which I think is probably helpful. It brings different skills. It makes you appreciate how local government and central government work – which is absolutely essential, to be able to work through the politics, particularly the politics in the North East, which we’ve had to work through.
When I joined the LEP [Local Enterprise Partnership], there was a team of six at the outset, back in 2012. At the time we had low budgets and a very limited remit around basic policy making, in the first instance. But we had the backdrop of an incredibly successful Regional Development Agency (‘RDA’) – One North East – which was highly respected within the region (and, my understanding is, highly respected in government at the time as well). It had something like 350 staff, an awful lot of money. Suddenly, that went [with the abolition of the LEPs in 2010] and there was an LEP team set up – not to do the same thing, but to replace the RDA in theory, with six people and no money.
The first few years were challenging, trying to establish what LEPs were. That’s evolved over the past decade, but at the outset it was very much looking at ‘what’s the economic policy for the region going forward’ and then, early on, bringing in Enterprise Zones, the first funding policy initiative. That was challenging, trying to get local businesses and our key partners to understand what on earth Local Enterprise Partnerships were. They didn’t want us, they just wanted the RDA as they had had previously. It was pretty challenging. I think we’ve come a long way since then. We’re the largest, or nearly the largest, LEP nationally, outside of those embedded within a Combined Authority. We are independent in terms of all of our decision making and governance, which is quite unique for our size. We’ve got 75 staff, quite a large portfolio which is quite different to many LEPs.
Q: When the LEP was first set up, what do you think it was aiming to achieve?
The remit I was given when I came into the post was very much around bringing growth to the area. Up until recently, I would say it’s been primarily about job creation and economic prosperity within the region, looking at where we get the most added value in the economy. (The last 18 months [during the COVID-19 crisis] has changed things slightly.)
Our Strategic Economic Plan has the strap line ‘more and better jobs’. That is absolutely the focus: to create 100,000 more jobs and 70% of those being ‘better’ jobs. We have six KPIs in the Strategic Economic Plan including those two [100,000 jobs and 70% of them being ‘better’], and we measure them with this all the time. The other four are about closing the gap around productivity and private sector job share with the rest of the UK.
Q: Why did you adopt that focus on ‘better jobs’?
It was partly about trying to understand how we skill the workforce, looking at where the opportunities are in terms of sectors and jobs. This wasn’t just for us [the LEP], it was about the economic wealth of the region. It wasn’t just your standard economic KPIs, it was about the residents and businesses and people who are actually here and how we make a better life for them now and and for future generations.
The skills piece for us is massive. We’ve got 75 staff about 33 of those purely working on skills, which is quite rare within LEPs. At the moment, we work with 70 primary schools to influence career choices from the age of five. Evidence tells us that once children get to the age of eight or nine, they’ve made choices in terms of maths and sciences and so forth. We’re really trying to get in early. We work with all 170 secondary schools across the region and nine colleges, trying to bring in the right enterprise and business skills into that, but also mainly on careers and then looking very closely at mismatching skill, the supply and demand piece, working particularly with the colleges (and less with universities on the skills agenda).
So, we are focused on upskilling the economic base of the region and the people that live here, and retaining people – particularly students coming out of the universities but, also retaining local people within the region and making sure that they’ve got career paths and opportunities within the region.
Q: How did it feel when you were working on the local authority side in the 1990s and 2000s, before you made the transition from that to a sub-regional role?
I used to head Economic Development in Newcastle City Council before I moved over to the LEP. It was bizarre because the RDA, although phenomenally successful, was very independent. It didn’t really work in partnership with the local authorities. It was very focused on sector growth and investment. The biggest difference between RDAs and the LEP model is partnerships…the clue’s in the title I suppose. It’s a partnership model. But also we’ve never had the budget or the capacity to do anything on our own. You have to work in a partnership, whereas the RDA, certainly in the North East, was very independent and had the capacity to deliver but didn’t necessarily work closely with partners in their delivery. It was something we were aware of. I’m not saying we never spoke to them, but it wasn’t an integrated delivery programme or anything like that.
I moved in 2012. I suppose, if I’m being blunt, we’d had three years of massive cuts in local authorities. As a senior manager, I was quite exhausted of going through a process of cutting staff year in year out. It wasn’t a great place to be. We literally spent three months of the year interviewing every member of my department to reduce the headcount. When I moved over to the LEP, it was new and exciting on the one hand. On the other hand I didn’t really know what I was letting myself in for because it was so new, it wasn’t tried at all.
Q: Setting up the LEP, when you spoke to Whitehall, was there consistency in what was expected of the LEP?
No. There never has been. I would say the same now. I don’t think there’s ever been any consistency at all. On delivering big capital programmes, there’s been quite clear guidance around that, it being down to each region to identify what their investment priorities are. That’s been relatively straightforward. Outside of that, it’s been for local areas to evolve their model themselves, how they operate: whether that is on governance or on what’s important in terms of delivery and policy. The thing that we’ve been asked to do, as an LEP-wide network, is produce a Strategic Economic Plan. We submit bids for Enterprise Zones, submit bids for Local Growth Funding and the Get Building Fund. Other than that, I don’t think there’s been structure around that at all, and even the Strategic Economic Plans. It was down to each region developing that for themselves.
Q: Did you feel that you’ve had the resources to do what you needed to be able to realise your preferred approach?
It depends on what you mean by resources. If you look at internal resources, there’s never been sufficient to do that, which may be why the partnership model has probably worked. I don’t know whether it’s worked successfully elsewhere in the UK, but it has certainly worked in the North East because we’ve had to rely on partners. Even now, my annual revenue operational budget is £7 million. I’ll get £500,000 of that from government and we source the rest ourselves to help us deliver. I had a comment at the LEP board last week from one of the council leaders about how he’s paying for the LEP. I did remind him he pays half a percent towards my budget. I suppose that comes back to the independent nature of how we are. We’ve basically developed a business, that’s probably the best way to describe it, that delivers the remit we need – and we think is the right remit for the North East.
Q: Which parts of central government have you found supportive? Has that changed over time?
All the departments that that we have worked with, and still do, have been helpful to varying degrees, depending upon what it is we’re trying to discuss. I wouldn’t say there’s any department where we’ve really struggled other than the Department for Education, in the past, less so now. We’ve worked really hard and we’ve got a national profile on what we do with skills, so we’ve got a better dialogue going now. But certainly when we used to have more regular face to-face-meetings in London, pre-pandemic, that was always the feedback from other LEPs. We didn’t really find it because we would tend to be around the table talking about how policy needed to evolve.
We were incredibly closely with the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, with the Department for International Trade, the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sports when we’ve needed to on digital remits…the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (‘MHCLG’) probably less so. There’s never been an issue around housing need in the North East, unlike the southern LEPs. (I’m being really stereotypical there. We’ve just never focused on housing so we’ve never really dealt with MHCLG other than on funding streams.)
Q: When the LEPs were set up, there was a weight of expectation given the legacy of RDAs. How did central government try to shape that narrative?
I can’t remember central government trying to shape that at all. There wasn’t central narrative coming out that I can remember. There wasn’t anything that we used to point to. That was the real challenge because one of the things we’ve worked hard on over the years is trying to brand our Strategic Economic Plan in the region. We’re now in a position, and have been for a long time, where I can go to all of the key partners, and a lot of people understand what the Plan is, what it says, what the priorities are – whether it’s the Vice Chancellors and the Universities, the local authorities, the airport, everybody understands that the LEP Strategic Economic Plan is the overarching document in the region that we all work to. That was the tool we used to embed what we were about.
Q: How have your views what is needed for a successful North East developed over time?
I’m a practical, pragmatic person. I’m not somebody who enjoys sitting in a room writing policy documents. I’m very much about delivery and making them real. So as we’ve developed as an organisation over the years. I say ‘What is the evidence telling us and what are we actually going to do about it?’ Whether it’s about what does that mean in terms of big strategic programmes or smaller projects, it’s always about understanding: ‘How are we going to use that data or research or evidence and do something about it and change it around?’ I keep coming back to this because it’s important to us, but if we go back to our SEP [Strategic Economic Plan] document, we’ll highlight where we think that the growth is going to be and where we need to focus. But at the back of our SEP there’s a delivery programmes which we monitor all the time.
We have five delivery programmes around skills, business growth, innovation, infrastructure and transport. We specify exactly what the vision is by 2024, the challenges and opportunities. Then there’s a detailed a bit about what we’re going to do within two years. We publish in LEP board papers, which are public, how we’re performing as a LEP or as a region, depending on who’s delivering the particular initiative, against all of those five. The key thing for me to flag that everything we do is based on evidence: we don’t just think that’s a good idea, it’s actually researched, it’s an output from evidence or data. Once we articulate what we think that initiative or project needs to be, we monitor that delivery closely and tweak as appropriate.
For example, we had what we called an Independent Economic Review, early on. We got a lot of donors, with Andrew Adonis to lead it. For us, that was a real game changer. The reason we did that was that we wanted to have an evidence base, but by people that weren’t the usual faces in the North East. The skills gap came out very high in that. One of our early breakthroughs came 2014, when we were approached by Sir John Holman to pilot the Gatsby Bench careers benchmarks. We piloted that for two and a half years and it was incredibly successful. It’s now national policy. We were on the front foot and that gave us a lot of recognition. We do a lot of national and international work around skills, showcasing what we do, but also learning from other areas. We were working, for example, with Nashville in the US, with the Ford Company, piloting new ways of delivering secondary education in the North East. We are going out to Munich to work with Bavaria, on the back of having Nissan here. We’re trying to understand how we get the right careers and skill sets to service advanced manufacturing industries and piloting new ways to do that within secondary schools, particularly. The skills director in the LEP, Michelle, laughs and says ‘I love a pilot.’ She goes in and finds new ways of delivering and moving things forward to improve skills and then tests them within either primary or secondary schools or colleges. We have been fairly successful in terms of proving what works and getting momentum from the secondary schools in how they deliver certain types of education.
Q: Has the expansion of higher education from the late 1990s been more of a help or a hindrance for the North East?
Definitely a help. It has to be. We’ve got four universities across three cities in the North East. We are not monocentric, we’ve got three cities who historically, in a good way, compete with each other. So having four core institutions, and everything that comes with that, is absolutely essential for the economy. In terms of education, those four universities are quite diverse. We’ve got Durham, where you have the vast majority of students moving in, internationally and elsewhere in the UK, at one end; and then Sunderland University, with something like 20 per cent international students and 60 per cent of local people living within a 30 mile radius. Newcastle and Northumbria sit in the middle of that. The four are on diverse ends of the spectrum in terms of what they deliver, their courses, but also in terms of whether they’re local or international students that come and whether they are living permanently or visiting students for a period of time. We are really trying to upskill local residents and work with the university do so. But we also want to attract students and graduates to stay within the North East as a base.
Q: Has London’s rise has been more of a help or a hindrance to the North-East?
For UK PLC, it has to be a positive, in terms of global positioning. But I think, yes it’s definitely a hindrance for the North East. There is a drain, particularly of the younger workforce going down to London. We’ve seen a bit of a reversal for the last three or four years; for example, the tech sector in the North East is the fastest growing tech sector outside London. In some sectors, or niches of sectors, that’s beginning to reverse a little. The impact of the pandemic and home working will have an impact as well. People born and bred in the North East, whether they were educated at university level in the North East or not, often start their careers in London or elsewhere but then come back to the North East once they start a family: they prefer to live here because of the quality of life, the cost of living and all of the positives. We tend to see people return to the North East in their thirties that may have gone down to London or elsewhere, Birmingham, Manchester or abroad, in their twenties.
Q: How can you make sure that the towns in the North East don’t get lost in a focus on core cities?
That is really challenging. Some of the stuff we deliver – business support, skills, transport – are region wide. Some of that transport investment has to go into the hubs, in the city centres. But the rest of the programmes are very much focused on delivering evenly across the patch. We’ve got a massive rural geography. The urban core, which has two million people, is still relatively small compared to the size of the geography that we cover. We have a lot of rural areas, so we get the same sort of question from the rural market towns and villages. Inclusivity is particularly high on our agenda and it’s tricky.
On local growth funding, we had £570 million of funds, quite a large proportion compared to other areas, and it was very much focused on need. We were really clear: it wasn’t that we wanted to spread it across and get everybody to have some sort of investment, but the way key employment sites are dispersed … they tend to be in in the towns rather than in the city centres (other than standard office commercial space in the city centre, as you would expect). Our focus was industries like advanced manufacturing, offshore energy, health and life sciences. All of those key clusters and employment sites aren’t within the city centre so that the investment has tended to not be within the city centre.
Q: What are your reflections on economic development capability in local authorities? How do Mayoral combined authorities play into that?
The seven local authorities in my LEP patch have all got different approaches to how you deliver economic development. These don’t necessarily go with the size of the authorities. Two out of the seven have dedicated, arm’s length organisations which are really well staffed up and very focused on business support and growth, typical economic development activity. A couple of them who have literally one or two officers who might manage business units but don’t really do what I would call economic development. The others sit in the middle of those two models and have experienced staff who have done that role for a number of years but don’t have extensive teams.
We tend to work in the North East with a hub-and-spoke model, where we do a lot of the strategic thinking and only do delivery where none of our partners are in a position to do so. We work very closely with the economic development directors in each of the local authorities. I meet them weekly on a Thursday or Friday morning, depending on which week it is, for a couple of hours where we share agendas.
We’ve got two combined authorities, one mayoral and one non-mayoral. I work incredibly closely with the Mayoral Combined Authority, which has grown very quickly over the last two or three years. It was established in November 2018 and there are about 50 staff now. The challenge for us, and it’s not a negative, is to ensure that we actually work together and don’t replicate what each of us are doing. That’s that tends to work okay most of the time until you bring the political layer in, which always adds complexity.
What we find in the North East is that our profession is a relatively small village. The same people who worked in the RDAs are now working in local authorities. Everybody knows each other very well and are still doing the same job with different hats on and moving around. That helps to embed those working relationships. With the MCA [Mayoral Combined Authority], we had a meeting earlier today with wider stakeholders, looking at what are we going to do about future strategic policy, because there’s clearly a vacuum at the moment in terms of what the government wants us to do. I’m conscious that the Strategic Economic Plan comes to an end in 2024 but it already needs some readjustment as evidence comes out from the pandemic and out of Europe. How do we position that where the mayor will want his own plan, manifesto, sense of direction in the context of a wider region? We try to have those conversations early, and work that through, rather than just having the LEP steaming ahead.
Q: So this is an ongoing process and a lot of it comes down to how you manage personal relationships, but the introduction of the MCA, at the moment is not necessarily hampering the ability of the LEPs to deliver?
What we need is clarity from government in terms of policy moving forward. The thing for me is that clarity of policy. There has never been clarity in terms of where there’s an MCA and where there’s an LEP, what is the difference in the rules? In the North East we’ve worked that through ourselves. But when there is any tension, it makes it quite challenging and political to work that through. It would be much easier to have, and I’m simplifying: the MCA does this, the LEP does that and let’s all continue to work happily together. At the moment, from the LEPs perspective, we’re leading on strategy, development, research, evidence. We work closely with the Mayoral Combined Authority and they accept that that’s our role. It’s then challenging for us as a LEP, covering seven local authorities, to then concentrate on just strategic plans for three of them [i.e. the constituent authority of the MCA], because I get pushback from the other four.
Q: Are there any ideas or policies that stand out in the past 20 years that you think have been really impactful?
I think there needs to be clarity around roles in economic policy going forward. I am worried about the UK Shared Prosperity Fund [the proposed replacement for European Structural Funds] heading towards local authorities or combined authorities to the exclusion of LEPs. I am accepting of that, if that’s what government wants – but there needs to be some top slicing for big regional projects. Most local authorities don’t have the capacity and capability to deliver big funding programmes. They’ve not done it for, for a decade or longer. What you will have is local politicians wanting their pet projects done with the capital funding that they get, which won’t necessarily add economic value within that little authority. In some areas in the North East that will happen. There needs to be some sort of top sliced regional funding available. If that comes through, great; if it doesn’t, there’ll be some really big missed opportunities, game changer regional projects that will make a difference, that local authorities can’t afford on their own and won’t join together to deliver.
ENDS