“When the Conservatives won last year’s election most voters had no clue that George Osborne was about to unleash an anti-local democracy, unelected regional quango genii from the bottle.
Having been trusted with more than 30,000 votes, the East Devon Alliance has done all we can to flush this out into the open. Most recently we discovered that the National Audit Office (NAO), the respected Government Watchdog, were conducting a study, this spring, into accountability and value for money in the ever more powerful “Local Enterprise Partnerships’.
As the NAO web site invited comment, we thought it would be helpful if we put forward a view on how Devolution was perceived to be proceeding from a local perspective rather than from Whitehall or the Establishment.
We feel that at present, flying a false flag of devolving more power to the regions, the LEPs are proceeding in a way that is unaccountable, lacks transparency and is likely to have a negative impact on democracy.
Realising our input might arrive in the final stages of compiling the report we also copied it to the Chair of the Public Accounts Committee (PAC), Meg Hillier MP. NAO reports are reviewed by the PAC.
In the event the NAO have come to similar conclusions to us.
If Mr Osborne is hell-bent on his ill-conceived scheme and Parliament is unwilling to trim his sails it is now up to local councillors to do the thinking for him.”
East Devon Watch 