But dig a little deeper and the picture becomes much more complex. Yorkshire's industrial past has been extraordinarily varied: textiles from West Riding, steel from Sheffield, coal from Doncaster.

Nowadays, there are stark contrasts between a small rural business in the Peak District and an SME in Leeds – so the support that they might need from government will be different.

We need to find ways to help more entrepreneurs succeed outside the UK's traditional areas of strength. According to the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor, in Yorkshire entrepreneurial activity decreased in the last two years – and is lower than the UK average. So building up the private sector in this region should be the ultimate goal of government. It's just bad economics for Britain to rely on the economic growth of one square mile to power the other 100,000. Yet despite the creation of an entirely new tier of regional government, all the evidence suggests that we're still seeing huge differences between the entrepreneurial culture of North and South, East and West, the City and the rest of the UK.

The main vehicles for achieving the Government's aims were the Regional Development Agencies, including Yorkshire Forward. But there has been confusion from the start. Given that they were originally the brainchild of John Prescott, this may not be entirely surprising. They came from the same man who said that "the Green Belt is a great policy and we are going to build on it".

The problem has been the remit of the RDA demands that they narrow the disparities between the UK regions, while at the same time promoting their own regions' economic growth. These are two useful aims: but put together they directly conflict.

The most baffling examples of this mess are the RDAs' overseas offices. Yorkshire Forward, for instance, collaborates with the North West Development Agency and One North East in funding offices in Japan, Australia and the United States. In total, the taxpayers' contribution to RDA foreign bureaux has been £20m since 2002.

There have been some successes. Yorkshire Forward has done sterling work with its Renaissance Project in physically regenerating Sheffield city centre. But, despite these welcome stories, the reputation of the Government's regional experiment is that it is wasteful, politicised and increasingly distant from business. A survey by the Financial Times last year showed that only a fifth of businesses said their RDA understood their needs well or very well.

Yet the Government is compounding these problems by strengthening the regional tier of government. Our fear is that Labour intends to remove RDAs a step further from their business focus, and then turn them into a body responsible primarily for regional planning – with command over large housing and highways projects.

This may well be a task that needs to be done, but where does it leave business-led regional development? Under a Conservative government, the RDA will have to be a different beast. But it is not our policy simply to abolish RDAs without giving any thought to their replacement. There are strong arguments for keeping the likes of Yorkshire Forward, and others, where there is strong local support and a keen business focus. But we also think that there should be scope for a variety of different models, each adapting to the specific needs of natural economic areas within and across regions.

We need the RDA to be what they should have always been: business-led bodies with a natural interest in stimulating and nurturing the growth of the local enterprise culture. Doing this will require stripping them of some of their key functions.

But we still need to do more to target areas of the UK that are failing to keep pace with the rest of the country. This can't be done through regional structures which don't take account of local interests. A recent report by the Local Government Association has made this point emphatically. As they say: "The boundaries of the Government's nine standard regions do not give a good fit with the economic data." The commercial patterns of the country do not fit into Labour's grand regional scheme. Local solutions are the only way forward.

Overall, we do not want to see RDAs morphed into some sort of bureaucratic non-business-minded planning apparatus from which the lifeblood of enterprise has been steadily sucked. Their confused identity of today needs to be resolved, and out of it needs to emerge a vibrant, imaginative, business-focused force which can genuinely drive the wealth-creating energies of any locality for the better.


Alan Duncan is the Shadow Trade Secretary.