Yesterday I visited Manchester and Oldham to launch the Regional Growth Fund – accompanied by our former Party President Sir Ian Wigglesworth and Michael Heseltine, who will oversee the fund. This is a fund worth £1.4bn to promote business and create jobs – and it will help bring about the fairer and more balanced economy Liberal Democrats have long been campaigning for.

It is vital that our economy moves away both from a dependence on the public sector and an over-dependence on a narrow range of sectors in the South East, such as banking. The government is committed to ensuring business opportunities are more evenly balanced across the country.

This requires a new approach, shifting power away from central government and giving it to local businesses and communities so that they can promote private sector growth and jobs in their area.

That is why in a statement in parliament yesterday Vince Cable announced that we are creating local enterprise partnerships that will bring together business and civic leaders to set the strategy and decisions that will work best for their local economy.

Our party has long believed that local government should have more powers over the money raised in their area. So we are looking to reform the planning system and put in place a series of incentives that will allow local areas to benefit from the proceeds of development. And it is why the Government’s White Paper commits us to looking at how local councils can have greater discretion over business rates.

For too long the direction of our economy has been over centralised and over reliant on the City and Whitehall. We are changing that. Liberal Democrats in government are transforming this – to a more green, more diverse and more local economy.