Posted by: Lorna Waterworth Category: newsletter,NWAA news Date: Tuesday, March 29, 2011

Copies of Plane Talk, the NWAA newsletter, should have dropped onto the desks of our members and contacts recently.

Click below to read a preview of the latest edition – here, Martin Wright, chief executive, gives his thoughts on regional funding.

The demise of the North West Regional Development Agency saw the end of the direct regional development funding in support of industry. The current replacement is the Regional Growth Fund (RGF), a pot of around £1.4 billion over three years. Available to English regions, the fund is open to industry, local authorities and other enterprises for specific projects above a nominal £1 million in value.

The closing date for first round bids was January 21, having opened on December 1, an incredibly short bidding timescale.

The NWAA has been engaged in a collaborative bid with other regions, in support of innovation in aerospace. The bid is a collaboration between ADS and the English aerospace cluster  organisations with the lead regions being the North East, the North West and the Midlands. These are regions with areas seen as being in most need of employment creation.

The bid is based on a successful Midlands scheme to promote and support innovation projects and process development projects in SME-based consortia. For the North West the fund is worth over £4 million covering a span of four years. In accordance with European funding rules this has to be matched with contributions from participating companies. Part of the fund is for companies to engage with the new National Manufacturing Centre based in Coventry, to develop innovative manufacturing processes.

The NWAA is also engaged with BAE Systems, universities and other partners in a second round RGF proposal to create the processes which technologies require for civil application for autonomous systems, in land, sea and air environments. This is aimed at the second round of bidding, the call for which is expected around April.

Some 450 proposals were submitted in the first round of RGF bidding, and this could well increase in the second round. The RGF is tied to job creation and this is always more difficult in a sector of high knowledge, long term wealth creation such as aerospace as opposed to the service sector.

Government will want to see the highest level of job creation possible in the short term to offset the increased unemployment from public sector cuts. Let us hope that there is a considered approach to a blend of short term job creation and long term wealth creation from this limited pot of the RGF.