Casting Disruption
3.9 Role of the CASE partner in practice
In the Introduction to this thesis I discussed the role of the CASE partner in this study, with significant input expected on the basis of access to both firms and policy actors through the SSP. In practice the role of the SSP as a research partner was very different. Whilst key information sources were forthcoming, these mostly came from Staffordshire County Council - technically not a member of SSP - as the lead organisation in delivering the Local Economic Assessment. SSP’s role in accessing interview subjects emerged in a more peripheral manner.
This also varied between the two sets of interview subjects.
112
For the firms we were looking to interview, access through SSP contacts proved to be very limited. The networks both SSP and its core LA members were involved in were limited. This varied between LA. Tamworth and Lichfield displayed some strong relationships with their businesses; these however tended toward business service, leisure and retail SME’s they were able to directly assist via support such as place marketing, business-to-business clubs, and facilitation with other Council services. South Staffordshire Council was forthright in the limited level of business engagement they had; this had largely emerged around their contact with personnel in the firms moving onto the i54 site. East Staffordshire and Cannock Chase had their own set of relationships through respectively the Burton Chamber and the Cannock Business Leaders Group. These however failed to produce any direct links into the business community; whether this was a statement of the limited nature of these relationships or of the interest these two LAs had in full engagement with the project is unclear.
Some information on potential subjects was forthcoming from the LA’s; at early stage interviews with the EDOs, a list of key firms within each area was established. This was supplemented by South Staffordshire with a list of firms with larger premises in their area taken from their Business Rates register. Fundamentally the LA connection provided only a limited number of firms and had to be significantly supplemented by alternative sources.
For the policy actors interviewed the SSP link again played out in a more limited capacity.
Two data collection exercises were planned for the policy actors. The first of these was a Network Questionnaire designed to determine the extent of internal and external Southern
113
Staffordshire dialogue within business or economic policy-related services of the five Southern Staffordshire Authorities. A sample of 36 officers was identified across the five LA’s, and questionnaires e-mailed directly alongside requests to the EDOs/SSP contacts to encourage their response. Considering the five LAs are both project stakeholders and funders, the vested interest in this should have encouraged participation – albeit with a little cajoling – and a response of 60-70% should have been easily achievable. In practice the return from the questionnaire was just 42%, and the extended period of 12 months it took to chase these returns raised questions over how legitimately they could be compared given the implications of working policy networks introduced during this 12 month period.
The second exercise was a set of face-to-face interviews with policy actors. Divided into four categories – LA Officers, Political Leaders, Business Leaders, and Other Stakeholders – the SSP was expected to provide a direct route to these subjects, a number of which were direct SSP members, and the remaining were likely to be partners. This link was again not as
effective as had been hoped, and some notable absences were seen in the subjects interviewed
including officers and political leaders from within the five Southern Staffordshire authorities.
Aside from these shortcomings, the benefit of the SSP connection came really through the legitimacy it offered the process in persuading subjects to participate in interviews. Whilst this may not have been forthcoming from all SSP members, which was disappointing, this legitimacy did help in making contact and appointments with senior people in both LEPs and in some big local businesses. Being able to say the interview was for research commissioned by the Southern Staffordshire Local Authorities to feed into their policy and investment
114
decision-making process played a key role in encouraging firms to participate in a way which saying it was for a PhD study alone would not have elicited.
Behind what should be seen as failings on the CASE partner’s side regarding support for the research are a number of factors, and it would be difficult to see ways to fully mitigate these.
The lead contact within the SSP acts as a point of coordination for Southern Staffordshire partners on both the GBS and the S&S LEPs. As such a large portion of his time is taken up preparing for, attending, and disseminating information from the meetings he’s required to attend. Being in two LEPs clearly has implications on time resources, and this runs parallel to a period of both uncertainty and rapid change within the sub-national economic governance environment which has similar time demands. The limited interest in participating from some of the partners may also make a statement of their commitment to and interest in the SSP as an ongoing platform for their interests. This is particularly the case for East Staffordshire, and toward the end of the study period they had announced their withdrawal from the Partnership.
In this chapter I have set out the methodological approach I will adopt in the examination of the relationship between spaces of economic production and economic governance in Southern Staffordshire. In the next chapter I progress this examination, considering first the Functional Economic Area of Southern Staffordshire.
115