Institutional Barriers to Enterprise Support: An Empirical Study

This paper reports on empirical research amongst clients of the Government Office for the East of England, exploring levels of satisfaction in order to generate, rather than validate, understanding. As the landscape of public enterprise support in Britain changes and new institutions come on stream, this case poses searching questions about the manner in which policy for economic growth can be delivered in the English regions. Efforts to eliminate confusion and incoherence in the support infrastructure appear not to have succeeded. Findings indicate that barriers between policy ambitions and effective take-up by client communities continue to exist. Clients perceive behavioural rigidities as a barrier to the development of the most effective public-private relationships. A sometimes centralist perspective (arguably, the predisposition of the support infrastructure) is in danger of allowing the benefits of support tailored to regional need to be overlooked. The objective is by “constructively discrediting the system” (as Bowen et al suggest) to stimulate useful debate about the way in which the enterprise culture might be supported.