What are your main priorities as you begin as chief executive of Yorkshire Forward?

My priority is to improve the economy of Yorkshire and Humber. We’ve got a very good track record in delivering on our targets: we’ve created tens of thousands of jobs, leading in millions of pounds of investment into the region, and I think we’re in pretty good shape, so I’m inheriting quite a good ship.

But there are three things that I really want to crack, particularly early on. We need to sort out business support in the region.

Yorkshire Forward inherited the contracts for BusinessLink organisations last year, and we’re going to be able to make some changes to those contracts from 2007 onwards. So we’re carrying out a major review at the moment of the investment that we make on business support, and I think there’s scope for us to be more effective and efficient in the way that we do that: that’s a big early priority for me.

Also, local government has a critical role in helping deliver our overall 10-year Regional Economic Strategy, and traditionally our relationship with local government has been a financial one, where we’ve worked with them to deliver local economic improvements to our single pot of government grant. What I want to do with that financial relationship is improve it, try and reduce the red tape around it and make sure that we’re delivering very effectively with all of our local government partners. What I want to do, and what I’ve already done, is open a dialogue with our local authorities, how we can extend the impact they make on the local economy, and I want to do that by working with them very much through their local area.

And thirdly, transport. As a region we receive three times less funding per head than London and the South East. We believe that we need a better deal on transport, so I have to make sure that Yorkshire Forward spearheads a very effective case to government for future transport investment over a long-term period. But also, we have to do something on the ground that is quite practical and pragmatic, because with the best will in the world there isn’t a huge amount of revenue likely to come out of the spending review next year, so we need to be realistic.

How do you see the cancellation of the Leeds Supertram project affecting your lobbying of central government for more transport funding?

Our point is that there was between £300m and £400m potentially allocated to that programme, and what we want to make sure is that that money isn’t lost to the Yorkshire region, and to Leeds in particular.

So what we want to do is work with the government to make sure alternative transport proposals come through that make an impact and happen on the ground on as short a timescale as possible – we’re in discussion with the Leeds partners, with the government, about a quality bus scheme, for example. So the real priority for us is that we don’t lose that money to the region.

How difficult is it for you to encourage business to look beyond London and the South East with regard to investment?

We see London as one of our greatest assets. In the world economy, the fact that we’re less than two hours away from a financial services sector like London that is genuinely world-class is a huge advantage for us in Yorkshire. So we see the strength of London being the strength of the rest of the country as well.

However, clearly we need to make sure that our region is growing as fast as it possibly can and realising its potential, and we do need to convince not just businesses but individuals, quality individuals, that they can have a career in Yorkshire and the wider North.

We have 50,000 graduates coming out of our universities each year, and frankly too many of them feel they’ve got to leave Yorkshire to get on. We believe they don’t; we believe we need to keep more of them up here. It’s a sort-of mini brain drain for us, and we’ve got programmes in place that are persuading more and more of them to stay.

The fact is that we have grown faster than the European average, faster than European regions, over the past five years in a row. We are one of the most successful European regions, but you rarely see that: because London’s done so well, everybody tends to compare us with London. What we’d like more of, is to recognise that London is a special case and is a huge success story, but compare our success with counterpart regions in the UK and Europe.

And when you start doing that you see that, actually, we’re an area of huge economic potential and growth that’s doing very well, and which businesses should see as a real quality location for them.

A common problem faced by Regional Development Agencies is proving to voters that they make a difference, that your work is valuable: how do you plan to tackle that?

I am very, very aware of the fact that we are unelected, and that nobody voted for us, and I think that places on us an extra duty to work with democratically elected, local politicians and national politicians to make sure that we factor in their plans to what we need to do in the region.

Because the fact is that if you don’t have a local authority behind what you’re trying to do then, frankly, it’s just not going to work. So we need to work in a much closer and challenging way with local government to make sure that our plans fit together and genuinely work to transform the economies at a local level.

I think it is important that we try to get across to taxpayers in a much clearer and simpler way what we’re trying to achieve and what we are achieving. I call it the pub test: when you walk into a pub and someone says, “what do you do?” and I say, “I work for Yorkshire Forward”, they probably ask, “Why? What does that do, then?” I think a lot of the RDAs suffer from this.

So I’ve come up with a quite simple message for myself and the staff here, that we invest £2.50 a week on behalf of each taxpayer in Yorkshire, and we need to make sure they get more than that back, in terms of an improved economy. That will happen in three ways:

• jobs: we’ve done great work in getting the Selby miners, 2,000 of them, back into work in a way that never would have happened in the 1980s;
• businesses: helping businesses become more successful, and we have great examples of inward investment and also growing our own businesses here;
• redeveloping: regeneration of our towns and cities, particularly the centres of them, and I think people can see visible signs of that change already.

So a very simple message, really: £2.50 on behalf of each person, get more of that back, through jobs, through businesses and through better towns and cities.