20th June 2002
BARNSLEY FORGES STRONGER LINKS WITH GERMANY

Senior executives from the regional development agency for the Duchy of Lauenburg in northern Germany have been visiting Barnsley as guests of Barnsley Development Agency (BDA) and Barnsley Metropolitan Borough Council (BMBC) to develop links further and share best practice in European regional development.

The visit by agency Director Werner Hesse and Senior Project Executive Dieter Hamann included a guided tour of key sites and projects, as well as meetings with the various BDA partner delivery organisations in Barnsley. There was also a meeting with Barnsley's new Mayor, Peter Doyle, and BMBC's Head of Planning, Martin Kimber, where the different approaches to site development and economic development between the two areas were explored and discussed. The German visit follows on from a similar fact-finding mission last year when senior representatives of BDA visited the Duchy of Lauenburg.

John Penney, chief executive of Barnsley Development Agency, said: "It's always useful to see how other European partners do things, to 'benchmark' our own methods against theirs, share ideas, and hopefully for both parties to learn new techniques and approaches. The powers and methods whereby local councils secure industrial development land through Werner and Dieter's development agency in the Duchy of Lauenburg was a real eye opener for us all, and has given us much food for thought - even though our legal framework is very different."

Jeff Pickering, BDA's Economic Development Manager, added: "Unlike Barnsley, the Duchy of Lauenburg has no mining background, but being located right next to the old East German Border it does have large disused military bases to redevelop as industrial sites, just in the same way as we have old pit sites to redevelop in Barnsley.

"The Duchy has a relatively weak local economically, and is located very close to the major city and regional economic power of Hamburg, which is not dissimilar to our own closeness to Leeds and Sheffield - so our tasks and challenges as inward investment agencies are very similar in many respects.

"We see the development and maintenance of contact with like-minded economic development practitioners and information sharing across Europe as very important in keeping us up with developments in the European market, and also useful in learning about different and possibly better ways of carrying out our regeneration activity in Barnsley in the future."


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