Slightly surreal to wake up this morning to the former big boss at PrintWeek Towers, Michael Heseltine, speaking into my ear. At first I thought I might have overdosed on a cocktail of Night Nurse and max strength cold remedy. Turns out Lord Heseltine was on the radio, silly me, talking about his new report "In Pursuit of Growth". Having heard the news coverage I started reading the whole report this morning. One of the first, and astonishing, comments I came across was a reference to a Lord Devlin report of 1972, which Heseltine says has remained largely ignored but could have been transformational in improving the ambitions and capabilities of British business, through world-class support systems at a local and trade level. It is unutterably depressing to think that something of such potential value has lain in a cupboard for forty bloody years. Let's hope the same thing doesn't happen to this report. Whatever one's opinion of Heseltine's political views, at least he was a politician with a genuine understanding about what's involved in running a business, unlike so many of today's career politicos. I like the idea of a formal growth strategy, and indeed the notion of implementing an MIS across Whitehall (despite government's poor record on IT contracts...). The numbers would be fascinating. Talk of more localism and devolving power – and funding – to the regions sounds laudable, but we need a system that doesn't involved jobs being lost in one part of the country because of development grants handed to companies in other areas (see blogs passim re QuebecorWorld, Prinovis Liverpool, Polestar Sheffield, Grapho Media etc). And, thinking about the vacillations between Regional Development Agencies and Local Enterprise Partnerships and goodness knows what other quangos going back into the last century, along with a piecemeal approach to funding, am in complete agreement with Lord H in that surely what business needs most of all is some sort of long-term stability in all this so at least they are dealing with a known-known. Then growth really might flow.