Agency for good.

Byline: JIM HANCOCK

SHOOTING from the hip was very much in fashion in Bournemouth last week with damaging results for the Lib-Dems. We had Nick Clegg annoying the grassroots with his talk of "savage cuts". Even "Saint Vince" Cable was criticised for not telling his fellow MPs about his Mansion Tax proposals.

On the theme of shooting, the Lib-Dem's parliamentary candidate for Bootle was sent home for joking to security staff that he had a gun in his pocket. But the remark that has caused the greatest stir in Liverpool is Warren Bradley's attack on the North West Development Agency.

I need to tell you that I occasionally receive fees from the NWDA for hosting events but I believe that does not prevent me from assessing the much wider interests of our North West communities.

The leader of Liverpool Council launched an attack on the plethora of bodies and bureaucracy that weigh us all down, a sentiment with which I entirely agree. But he picked a bad example when he said the NWDA was "a middle man" that needed dealing with.

I am impressed by the good work the agency has done in its 10 years of existence, funding many vital regeneration projects and looking at the wider interests of Merseyside and the North West.

I am not alone in this view. Phil Redmond waxed eloquently on the subject in this paper on Friday. Len Collinson, of Private Sector Partners, contrasted the NWDA with the stuttering progress of local councils putting together the Liverpool City Region Partnership.

Best of all was Ian Meadows, former chairman of the Liverpool Chamber of Commerce. He believes that if the Lib-Dems or Tories were in power and abolished the NWDA then the decisions on funding regeneration projects would be back in the hands of civil servants.

There was a time when we lacked the regional expertise to help ourselves. I was talking to Michael Heseltine about it last week when he attended the last conference of the Mersey Basin Campaign.

He remembered in 1979 and 1980 operating from a Liverpool hotel with a bunch of civil servants. They were micro managing the first stages of projects like the Garden Festival and Albert Dock because there was nobody else to do it. Let's not put Sir Humphrey back in charge.

Events move rapidly during the conference season. I am now in Brighton with Labour where the delegates are looking for any straws of comfort they can clutch on to.

Certainly Merseyside delegates' morale was boosted before they set off with the great news about the building of the baby Range Rover at Halewood securing the plant's future for 10 years. Now we need similar guarantees for Ellesmere Port.

The problem for the Labour party is that many election experts believe that most people decide who they are going to vote for a good year before voting and Labour are now trailing behind the Conservatives, even in the North.