Commenting on Sheffield City Region LEP securing £320million in funding from central Government, Richard Wright, executive director of Sheffield Chamber, said:
“We welcome this announcement and the amount being provided, and recognise the work put in to secure it. The challenge is now how this money will be spent and what return we get from it.
“The judgement of whether those decisions are successful will be on how much growth is achieved in the private sector. One thing is for certain, we have got to achieve more than what we did in the past with the money provided to us from Europe.
“Whatever we did before was clearly not as good as it could have been, so we need to look at achieving growth differently.
“Business would ask for three things: firstly that the money is invested against the return it achieves, secondly that any money getting to business is not tied up in too much red tape and buearocracy, and thirdly that the decisions are made against the regional benefit and not “allocated” within political boundaries.
“The LEP provides us that opportunity and we must take hard commercial decisions if we really want long-term sustainable growth.”
