WHATEVER your view of the South West Regional Development Agency — positive, negative or ambivalent — one thing I think we, and even the RDA, would agree on is that it is unlikely to survive in its present form.

Business Secretary Vince Cable has signalled plans to scrap RDAs in more prosperous regions where he doesn't think they are needed, and given the South West's perceived overall prosperity, the writing's on the wall for our agency.

What this overlooks, of course, are the deep pockets of economic need that pepper our region, like Cornwall, Torbay and our more deprived rural and inner city wards.

By contrast, the North, North West and Yorkshire have already been singled out by the coalition Government for special treatment due to their economic difficulties, in no small part through a concerted public and private sector campaign to bang the drum in those areas.

It also means we face potentially disproportionate cuts in the South West as the Government tries to save £270million this financial year across all England's RDAs. If it is going to feather-bed the North, we get harder hit.

Asked about Cornwall's economic problems during a recent TV interview, Mr Cable's response (and I'm paraphrasing) was: "Cornwall will be all right, it'll have an LEP."

An LEP, or Local Enterprise Partnership, is a woolly construct bandied about by the Conservatives before the election, and still isn't very clear.

Planned to replace RDAs, they are intended to be led by local authorities and business groups, and be able to break out of what the Tories called the regional straitjacket. A number of local authorities can come together to form a LEP.

This will strike a chord with many in our part of the region who have long argued that a 'South West' from Swindon to Penzance has never been cohesive and is too disparate when it comes to co-ordinated economic development.

But I want to sound a note of caution. Tempting as it may be for parts of the South West to regard themselves as 'unfettered' with the likely demise of the RDA, the spatial strategy, and other trappings of 'regionalism', we must be on our guard against lurching too far and too quickly in the other direction. We don't want to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

There is a very real risk that our region could become so fragmented in pursuit of local LEP agendas that its collective voice — crucial in recent years in lobbying for major regional infrastructure projects and investment, both in Whitehall and in Brussels — is eclipsed by those with louder voices, including in the North, where we know they already have the ear of Mr Cable.

Cornwall is a case in point. Its elected members and MPs make no secret of their desire for it to have its own LEP, self-contained in its unitary authority footprint with control over the European Convergence Programme (now mainly administered by the RDA), and a far greater say in its own affairs.

For Cornwall to achieve this would be to fulfil a decades-old political ambition that taps a deep groundswell of pride among the Cornish people, who have felt for too long that they have not been masters of their own destiny.

My own firm was founded in Cornwall on the back of the china clay industry, and we have offices in St Austell and Truro, so I'm no stranger to the county.

But what concerns me is the extent to which this agenda risks being driven by politics rather than by pragmatism.

Some of the debate has already been hijacked by the sort of emotive language that starts to worry businessmen like me who want Cornwall to be seen as it really is — a progressive, go-ahead county that is breaking new ground when it comes to enterprise, innovation and education.

Instead, from some of the rhetoric I've heard, you'd be forgiven for thinking that Cornwall is about to pull up the drawbridge and cast itself off from the rest of the country, having picked through the bones of the RDA and taken what it thinks it needs to make a success of economic development.

Cornwall may well want to go it alone, but I remain to be convinced that this is in its best long-term interests, because will its voice be strong enough to be heard above the plethora of other regions, many with larger, better resourced LEPs, and will it ever be able to attract the investment it needs to continue its economic renaissance?

Wouldn't it make sense to explore instead an LEP with Devon, Plymouth, Torbay and maybe even parts of West Dorset to create a bigger economic unit with more clout? I think we need the debate.

But what concerns me most is that these LEP agendas risk being pursued without real involvement from business.

As someone running a business with offices in Devon and Cornwall, I want to ensure that whatever structures emerge from the passing of RDAs will have the clout to get the best deal from Whitehall and from Brussels.

And I think that means retaining, at least in part, some of the functions our RDA currently performs. There has to be something that can act as an interface between local authorities and Whitehall because, let's face it, they've never really know how to talk to each other.

In fact it's fair to say that many local authorities don't know how to talk to each other, either.

Whatever your views of the RDA there is a reservoir of expertise there that knows how to play the Whitehall and Brussels game, and as a region we need to try to retain at least some of that knowledge — we're going to need it if we are to make these new structures work.

But our overriding priority right now must be to secure the funding necessary to match- fund our European programmes, which are worth hundreds of millions of pounds across the South West, especially in Cornwall, and will run out in 2013.

'Match funding', much of which comes from the RDA, is a bit of a misnomer because many European-funded projects have a so-called intervention rate of more than 70 per cent.

In other words, you only have to find 30 per cent of the project costs to claim the grant, so you can more than double your money.

Take away that match and we risk losing more than twice its value and handing it all back to Brussels — and that would be unforgivable.