With the news that Worthing, Adur, Chichester and Arun have made submitted a late bid to be a local enterprise partnership, we have now a full 57 varieties.
The government's plan was to encourage a diverse range of responses to local economic problems. Rather than be perscriptive about what they should do, government has chosen to see what sort of proposals come in and work from there. But with so many LEPs and different types of LEPs being proposed, the danger is that business will simply disengage from this alphabeti spaghetti of organisations.
The onus is now on Ministers to accept only those that have a credible plan to address the issues in their economy, have the critical mass that will help them to deliver and have strong backing from business.
If not a £1 billion fund to support LEPs and their growth strategies is going to have a pretty minimal impact on local economic priorities and performance and more importanly, we could well be revisiting this policy in the not to distant future.