Employment and Skills

As you will be aware, The Lancashire Partnership has been going through a review of its structure, aims and objectives following a recent period of consultation with partners. For updates, please visit the Lancashire Partnership website.

Meanwhile, partners in the Economic Development Theme Group of The Lancashire Partnership have continued to deliver against the National Indicators 152, 153, 155, 163, 165, 166 and 171 agreed in the Lancashire Local Area Agreement 2008-2011.

Since the introduction of the new coalition government in May 2010 we have all seen and heard a number of announcements and activities aimed at reducing the traditional public sector 'Red Tape' and moving towards a 'Big Society, Smaller government' position.

Later in 2010 Eric Pickles, Communities and Local Government Secretary, made a statement around the immediate cessation of Local Area Agreements and the measurement of achievements towards the National Indicators.

In Lancashire, our Economic Development partners agree that the priorities we had set – to increase productivity, skills and enterprise and to reduce the gap – are still our priorities. All that has changed is the requirement from Government Office to report and measure our performance against the indicators.

As a partnership we still need to agree the way forward and we have started to discuss our future needs and arrangements. But in the meantime, we are all experiencing changes, in our policy, process and delivery, internal structures and customer demands. Our partners all agree that we should collectively continue to work towards meeting our Lancashire priorities, as detailed in Ambition and we will endeavour to update these pages as and when more information is available. We would like to assure you all of our continued support and effort on behalf of the economic development theme throughout the transition period.