You may have heard of the government’s plans for Local Enterprise Partnerships (LEPs):

joint local authority-business bodies brought forward by local authorities themselves to promote local economic development – to replace Regional Development Agencies (RDAs)

Marc Reeves has written an amusing summary of the situation in the West Midlands. Or it would be amusing if this stuff wasn’t quite so important. Essentially it’s all a bit of a mess. Here’s the substantial bit:

Business VoiceWM, 17 Chambers of Commerce and their affiliates, IoD, CBI, the EEF, FSB, the Noddy Club, and Kingswinford Lions have joined with 65 other business organisations to each separately make several statements about how united they all are about Doing Something Serious for the West Midlands. Unfortunately, none of them quite knows what that is.

Marc suggests we compare and contrast this with the harmonious situation in Leeds. Manchester seem to be doing pretty well too. If you want more detail then David Bailey in the Birmingham Post has been worth a read on this subject recently. Follow The Business Desk (WM) too.

There’s a worry going round that businesses aren’t sufficiently involved in the discussions around what might/might not come out of all this. I’d bet that creative industries businesses/freelancers are even less involved. It’s important to have a voice in the discussions though, especially given the amount of funding/investment funnelled into the industry and the extent of the cuts predicted.

So people should get involved. There are a few questions though:

• with the current level of uncertainty, who are the people we should be speaking to?
• how should businesses/people get involved?
• who’s getting involved on whose behalf?

Answers on a postcard…

UPDATE

There’s some great comments below. Additionally, Dave Harte has written a stat-stuffed companion piece.

So, in chronological order…

At the end of June this year, Terry Grimley revealed that a feasibility study was being undertaken into developing such a museum. The Arts Council and AWM had each chucked in £90k and the city council have apparently also contributed £200k ‘to enable Ikon to mount a programme of high-profile events in Eastside as a test bed’.

The idea for this was first mooted in 2006, around the time Ikon Eastside was first opened. Unfortunately I can’t find Terry Grimley’s article from back then.

Coun Martin Mullaney was quoted saying:

I’m keen to support this. We want it to be on a par with Tate Modern and the Guggenheim in Bilbao

and suggesting the site of the wholesale markets as the location. The Birmingham Central blog picked up on this, adding:

With the Wholesale Markets moving and a large space being created it would offer a central focal point to attract visitors to the Southside area and build on the creativity of Digbeth.

The idea was discussed by a panel at The Art of Ideas II – A New Museum for the 21st Century on 8 July, but I’ve no idea what was said. Does anyone know if there was a recording?

A few weeks later, The Guardian’s Matt Price asked ‘Does England really need another contemporary art museum?‘ He put some bones on the proposal:

From the public discussion earlier this month, it was clear that Watkins (Jonathan Watkins, director of Ikon, and the person leading the proposal) is thinking big: he wants vast spaces capable of presenting large-scale sculptures and installations, with an acquisitions policy aiming to collect the most celebrated artists currently working around the world

He also pointed out some of the rationale behind the project – that many towns:

don’t actually own much of the art they show; public collections of contemporary art around England simply aren’t as good as they should be. Arts Council England acknowledged this in a 2006 report, bluntly asserting that “regional collections in England do not represent the visual art of our time”

Providing some balance, he goes on to point out that many West Mids museums have good, specialist collections of contemporary art and that developing these might be worthwhile (not to mention cheaper). However, the conclusion to the article, and so Matt’s answer to the question, is ‘yes, it could be really good if it works’. Well, yes…

Curator and writer, Charlie Levine, chipped in with an article ‘Tricky: A new museum for Birmingham?‘. Although initially convinced by the arguments espoused at the Art of Ideas II, she sounded a few cautious notes and wondered whether it would not be better to invest in and support local, emerging artists ‘to create a successful and supportive art economy’.

Which leads us to the item that sparked this post – a news piece on the Arts Council website proclaiming that ‘Our chair welcomes plans for Birmingham contemporary art museum‘.

Arts Council chair Liz Forgan, at Ikon’s annual dinner this week, said:

It is truly ambitious. I know that it is early days, and the feasibility study is only just being developed. But Birmingham needs the visual arts to flourish in the city; it needs to realise its aspirations for the visual arts that it has already achieved in other art forms. People may say that it’s not an auspicious time to raise funds for such an ambitious project. But I say ambition is good!

We at the Arts Council support ambition and excellence and we will do our utmost to support you in this endeavour. Of course I can’t make any commitments, and I am sure you wouldn’t expect me to – not here, not tonight anyway! But I do want to say that we have supported you, we are supporting you and now we are keen to try to apply some of the innovation we have talked about tonight to find new ways of supporting you.

Although she also made some odd claims about Ikon’s existence halting the proliferation of lap dancing clubs in the city. You can download Liz Forgan’s speech here.

So where does that leave us? Well, the feasability study’s yet to be completed and there’s been very little mention of the cost of the thing so far, which must be a big issue at the moment. There seems to be a lot of intial support for the idea though, so I guess we wait and see what that report says.

LUCID is a research project funded by Advantage West Midlands as part of Birmingham’s Science City project which aims to help SMEs in the area to develop content and applications for mobile devices.

Screen Media Lab has created two workshops to bring ICT and multimedia SMEs in the West Midlands up to speed with the latest developments in mobile information delivery, and enable them to start providing mobile content and services.

The first workshop, on Jan 22nd 09, will give the SMEs an introduction to the issues, technology and opportunities. The second workshop, on Feb 5th 09, will deliver a set of practical tutorials and consultancy with mobile experts.

For more information, please contact Alexa Torlo on 0121 204 9882 or alexa.torlo@bcu.ac.uk