ANOTHER week and another well intentioned attempt to help the north play a bigger part in the economic recovery.

On the face of it Ed Miliband’s proposals to hand more control over business rates revenue to local decision makers has merit. Why should Whitehall mandarins make decisions on how cash is spent in the North-East when the purse strings can be held by regional power brokers who better understand what makes their area tick?

At the moment, business rates are collected locally but the money is handed to central government to be redistributed to councils. The Coalition has allowed councils control of 50 per cent of the revenue, but Lord Adonis, the architect of Labour’s plan, want to give up to £30bn of responsibility over the course of a Parliament for big projects.

The Labour peer, who led the North East Independent Economic Review, which was commissioned by the North East Local Enterprise Partnership, has long been an advocate of creating regional economic powerhouses.

Devolving spending decisions to the regions has become a hot topic across all of the main parties. As the General Election looms they seem to have remembered that there are areas hundreds of miles from Westminster that have yet to feel the full impact of a recovery that is creating jobs and rising house prices in the South-East.

A Labour government would transfer powers to existing councils and encourage them to pool their resources to create combined authorities, such as the one that covers the area from County Durham to Northumberland. This would give them the economic clout to close the vast differences in prosperity and growth that exist across England, reckons the Labour leader. But where would that leave an area such as Tees Valley? Its local authorities already work closely and share strategy on economic development as part of Tees Valley Unlimited. Would it be deemed capable of handling greater economic powers?

In tough times would Labour's plan force local authorities to decide their own spending cuts, and protect the government from unpopular decisions over the loss of local services? Won't poorer areas, with fewer firms, be the losers?

Like George Osborne’s vague notion to create a Pennine powerhouse via high speed rail links, Labour’s plan asks as many questions as it answers.

One place the next government should start is to undertake a major review of business rates, currently based on 2008 property valuations.

Commercial properties in the North-East have lost value since the recession while in London they have rocketed. A rates review would be a sensible, practical step towards tackling the chronic regional imbalances in growth which Miliband’s latest idea seeks to address.

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