‘We help our members grow through a variety of networking opportunities.’

Training programme to fill vacuum

A new business start-up programme has been launched to fill a ‘vacuum’ created by a looming court case. Earlier this year the Reporter revealed that the Newry and Mourne Enterprise Agency’s (NMEA) contract for the delivery of Invest NI’s Go For It Programme had not been renewed and had instead had been awarded to the Go Group and KMPG. As A Result of this NMEA and 31 other affected enterprise agencies began legal proceedings to challenge the decision. Speaking to the Reporter NMEA chief executive Dr Conor Patterson said that this had created a vacuum that his organisation hopes too fill. “This is not a situation we want to be in,” he said. This is a situation we want resolved amicably. It is not one of our making. We cannot understand how the expertise we have here and the achievements we have that are indisputable can be overlooked. We are hoping we can fill this vacuum that is here at the moment. But in the meantime we are offering this new to business support package from next week. People who contact us will get a free initial consultation . As we are a charity and seek only to cover our costs, we give that advice genuinely and not with a view of making this a profit centre – it won’t be. Unfortunately we have to cover our costs in providing this service but in costing this out we have tried to keep this cost to a minimum. If this issue with Invest NI is resolved, we are committed to the provision of a free service, we believe it should be free.” The new training programme offers four specialist training courses (finance, taxation and book keeping, sales and marketing and ICT) in addition to pre and post training consultations. In the longer term Dr Patterson would like to see the local councils afforded greater powers in the development of the local economy. “Our view is that this economic emergency equates to the political challenge that we had after the ceasefires we had in 1994/95 when the EU established district partnerships to invest peace and reconciliation money. We believe this needs to be the model now. That level of local commitment can not be replicated centrally. So what we are proposing is that that there should be local enterprise partnerships established, led by councils who are statutory bodies with a statutory role in economic development. They are democratically accountable to their populations. But are established by local enterprise agencies that are locally led by volunteers based locally.

 

Newry Reporter

2nd November 2011