Ed Balls in pledge to revive axed quango Advantage West Midlands
Axed regeneration quango Advantage West Midlands will be revived in some form if Labour gets back into power, shadow chancellor Ed Balls has said during a visit to the region.
Speaking to the Express & Star ahead of a meeting with 140 Labour supporters in Bilston, Mr Balls said the closure of £300 million-a-year AWM had left a "gaping hole" in the region's economy.
The coalition government did away with AWM, which employed around 200 people, in a bonfire of the quangos to save billions of pounds of taxpayers' money.
But the organisation was responsible for providing funding to businesses to help them to grow and for drawing down £215.9m of funding from Europe. The government replaced regional development agencies like AWM with Local Enterprise Partnerships, made up of business and council leaders.
Before the private meeting at Bilston Town Hall Mr Balls said: "There's a gaping hole now. The LEPs don't have the resources.
"I'm not going to say 'here's our blueprint', but we need to think about that. "There's a gap where AWM was."
Asked how he would fund a body like AWM he said: "Everyone knows we've got to tighten our belts and it's going to be hard for a Labour government to spend money and in some areas there will be difficult decisions on pay and pensions.
"If we don't invest to support developments in science, the economy ends up weaker. We've had two wasted years, I don't want us to have 10 wasted years."
AWM was criticised by Conservatives for its high wages and the final pay-offs of its bosses.
Its last accounts before its closure earlier this year reveal chief executive Mick Laverty walked away with a £140,722 redundancy payment. In total, 12 executives received pay-offs of more than £100,000.
