Never mind OUR Local Enterprise Partnership appears to think that Devon and Cornwall (in spite of getting no budget goodies) will RACE ahead and do FAR better than any other area, not only in England, not only in the UK, not only in Europe but in the WHOLE world!
What busy bees we are in the south-west – or maybe just at Hinkley C!
“… Paul Johnson, director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, added that the economic forecasts published in the Budget made for “pretty grim reading”.
He highlighted that since 2014 growth in earnings has been “choked off”.
“We are in danger of losing not just one but getting on for two decades of earnings growth,” he said.
“Let’s hope this forecast turns out to be too pessimistic.”
East Devon Watch 
The reasons for this may well be quite simple to understand:
1. The bigger the growth projections, the more money your LEP will be allocated by government.
2. The more money you have in your LEP budget, the bigger the salary you can demand / decide / pay yourself.
3. The more money you have to spend, the more you can spend through your own companies. Then you can pay yourself a bigger salary from your own company too, to go with the bigger salary that you are now receiving from the LEP. And then of course, your company also makes bigger profits – indeed likely to be much bigger profits because their contracts with the LEP are likely to have had far less competitive pressures to keep the price low – so that means bigger dividends for t he shares you own.
So its a win-win-win situation. (Or at least it is a win-win-win from the LEP executive’s perspective – from my perspective it is a lose-lose-lose situation as the already rich friends (or sponsors) of the government get even fatter at tax-payers’ expense i.e. at my expense, whilst normal people suffer from austerity with poor health and social care, deteriorating education and infrastructure and less money to live off. But until the rest of the country wake up to this and stop voting Conservative there is not much we can do about it.)
Of course, when the growth doesn’t match up to the expectations you have set, then the LEP can always crib from the Owl and say that growth is down everywhere, and the SW has suffered from that too.
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