Yorkshire Post Business Barometer: Avoiding civil war in Yorkshire (VIDEO)

Michael Longden, a partner at the Leeds office of law firm Irwin Mitchell, said that the regional development agency needs to be replaced with an organisation which will provide a coherent Yorkshire identity.

"Yorkshire has both an enormous strength and potentially quite a serious weakness," Mr Longden said.

"In the Manchester region an awful lot of local authorities surrender their brand identity for the brand of Manchester and have done so for many years.

"Our cultural identity, I'm afraid, is somewhat different. It reminds me, nothing so much as a renaissance set of Italian city states permanently at war."

Italy in the 15th century saw incessant war among the independently-ruled city states of Venice, Milan, Florence, The Papal States and Naples.

Mr Longden made the comments at an event to discuss the findings of the Yorkshire Post Business Barometer, a major piece of research into the views of 200 company directors in Yorkshire.

Irwin Mitchell is sponsoring the research, which was carried out by Leeds-based marketing agency Brass, formerly known as Brahm.

Twelve selected business leaders and politicians attended the round table event at Irwin Mitchell's Leeds office to debate the main issues facing businesses.

The research found that 55 per cent of businesses wanted to retain the regional development agency, which is being abolished and replaced by a series of local enterprise partnerships under the coalition government.

Barry Dodd, chairman of Wetherby-based engineering group GSM, said: "What's important is that we make the very best of this as businesses and try to lead it."

Mr Dodd, who is also chairman of a temporary business forum set up to advance plans for a new pan-Yorkshire business voice, added: "What I don't want to see is whatever we're doing in the future broken up into little penny packets so it becomes ineffective." According to the research on business support, almost one in five businesses do not know where to go for information or financial help.

Chris Rea, managing director of Rotherham-based mechanical seal company AESSEAL, said: "I'm sure there have been many admirable, laudable programmes, but how much have we spent, in total, on all of the quangos, all of the skills councils? We business people are just confused. Where do you go? It's labyrinthine."

He added: "I want to know how much money have we spent on providing support to industry and how much of it ever got to the good causes?"

Anne McIntosh, Conservative MP for Thirsk and Malton, described the Train to Gain scheme as "a massive waste of money". She added: "It didn't seem to provide the skills and training that employers were saying to us that they needed. That is something that has to be reviewed." Former Yorkshire minister, Rosie Winterton, the MP for Doncaster Central, said: "During the downturn a lot of the money assisted with retraining. Much of that was what industry had asked for."

Another issue facing businesses is transport and communications links to the rest of the UK and abroad.

Over half of those questioned said Yorkshire's airports, roads and railways are well connected to other UK regions but only about a third said they were well linked to other world markets.

Carl Lapworth, operations director at Leeds Bradford International Airport, admitted the lack of international connectivity was a concern. "It's like a hobble that we've grown to get used to," he said. "We haven't got the infrastructure we need and what we're committed to doing is making that happen."

Mr Lapworth said access to both Leeds Bradford and Robin Hood airports would be addressed in the future but the road infrastructure could currently cope with the number of passengers currently passing through the airports.

Master Cutler James Newman added: "There isn't a dual carriageway within five miles of those two airports, which is absolute nonsense."

To download a copy of the Business Barometer presentation, please click here. (Adobe Acrobat required; 1mb download)