Bernard Ginns: Can Yorkshire create its own community interest company?

Ministers Vince Cable and Eric Pickles wrote to civic and business leaders last week, inviting them to come together to form these new partnerships and "provide the strategic leadership in their areas to set out local economic priorities".

The key word in their letter is "local". The coalition government dislikes regional structures – they are a discredited Labour tool – but the ministers said they would not stand in the way if that is what local people wanted.

Unsurprisingly enough, local people can't agree. Sharp differences have emerged between different parts of Yorkshire over whether a region-wide organisation should be set up. Having been promised new powers, it seems unlikely that some council leaders would want to give them up. Amid all this, who is speaking up for Yorkshire as a region, as a brand, as an entity? Step forward Julian Smith, the new Conservative MP for Skipton and Ripon. In a timely article for the Yorkshire Post, Mr Smith said he supported his government's decision to call time on Yorkshire Forward.

But he also said that the agency got right a number of things in a region which, despite his scepticism, does need some form of co-ordination to ensure economic success.

He said broader regional goals would not be achieved by leaving it up to local councils to deal with big ticket investment opportunities such as carbon capture and storage.

And he questioned whether the UKTI quango – set to take over responsibility for inward investment – would fight flat out for Yorkshire, which means the region would be given significantly less priority than other areas. Mr Smith said: "Yorkshire has a massive advantage over all other regions English – it has a strong brand. The Yorkshire name counts for a lot in the UK and internationally. And it is a name backed by strong values of hard work and creativity. We should nurture that."

If he were running it, the new region-wide organisation would be a community interest company run by board members from business and a high-calibre chief executive and would report monthly to local government and business.

According to the regulations, community interest companies are limited companies, with special additional features, created for the use of people who want to conduct a business or other activity for community benefit, and not purely for private advantage. They cannot be formed to support political activities.

Mr Smith said the company would have two goals – to sell Yorkshire to the world and take responsibility for large-scale Yorkshire-wide economic development such as tourism, hi-tech and green investment.

His voice is a significant addition to the debate and one that I know has caused a lot of reaction. Something is most definitely afoot in Yorkshire.

A number of influential people from business and politics in Yorkshire have been meeting behind the scenes to discuss what kind of support there might be for such a regional company.

The idea is that this company would be able to bring in money to the region from London and Brussels. It would be able to help Yorkshire manufacturers with export and trade overseas.

I hear a group of manufact-uring companies is interested in the idea. One manufacturer I spoke to said he would rather bank on export support from Yorkshire than get in the queue for London-based help.

This is the sector that the coalition government hopes will help rebalance the UK economy away from financial services and onto sounder footing. If this idea has support from the region's manufacturers, then it has legs.

If it has support from the wider business community and local councils, then Yorkshire could well make history and be the first region in Britain to have its own community interest company.

Formative times indeed.

Anyone looking for an optimistic take on Britain and its prospects might have been disappointed by Jon Moulton's speech at Leeds University's Corporate Wisdom lecture series last week.

Upbeat it was not. According to Mr Moulton, a successful venture capitalist, the financial system remains unstable. There is too much debt in it. You can-not predict things will remain stable. There is fear about the market place. Off-balance sheet liabilities of the government are anywhere between 125-310 per cent of GDP.

Bleak stuff. There is however a solution, said the founder of Better Capital. Borrowing an idea from the IMF, all we need to do is stabilise pension and healthcare spending in relation to GDP, reduce the rest of spending and raise additional revenues in an efficient and equitable manner. Easy.