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For Oldham, it was the "Day of the Deputies".

On Thursday the Deputy Prime Minister, , visited an injection mould factory in the town. He was accompanied by a predecessor, the former Conservative Deputy Prime Minister, Michael Heseltine.

They were there to reassure local businesses that they have a coherent strategy to encourage the growth of the private sector.

This is crucial as the government carries out its more radical plan to reduce the size of the public sector.

There are more people employed by the state in the North West than in any region of England outside London which makes it vulnerable to these changes.

Nationally the private sector is already expanding but the government needs to accelerate the process.

That is one of the reasons why many people were disappointed when ministers scrapped the , the NWDA.

It seemed to be considered successful and popular among business leaders.

So time to swap one acronym for another and welcome Local Enterprise Partnerships, or LEPs.

Greater Manchester gets one, the so-called Liverpool City Region another, Warrington and Cheshire create a third and there's a fourth for all of Cumbria.

Very noticeable that Lancashire did not manage to get a single one off the ground despite three options being put on the table.

How much of a difference will they make?

One expert told me this is a classic example of "form before function". In other words nobody is quite sure how they will work.

In theory they will be led by business with other bodies, like councils, on the boards.

But they will not have any direct funding. Instead they will bid for cash from a variety of sources.

This is where comes in.

To ease the transition away from the regional development agencies there will be a pot of money called the Regional Growth Fund.

Lord Heseltine, who has plenty of experience with regeneration projects in the North West, will chair the Fund and decide who gets some of the £1.4Bn on offer.

No doubt this is welcome but the regional development agencies had three times as much money between them. And anyone can bid for this cash, not just LEPs.

The Fund will only run for two years and Labour believes all the cash could run out after the first wave of bids in January.

Lancashire better get a move on.

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When the government announced its first round of cuts to local councils, Liverpool was the most badly hit in England.

It lost £9.3M from so-called area based grants, money which was aimed specifically at helping poorer areas.

This meant that councils in richer areas lost nothing, something which Liverpool - and other councils in the North West - considers deeply unfair.

Further salt was rubbed into the financial wound, when Liverpool lost £350M from the Building Schools for the Future programme.

Theoretically if this financial trajectory continued, the council says it would be running a budget deficit of £120M in four years time.

But it has more than a hundred million in the bank and change is inevitable.

The new Labour administration blames the previous Liberal Democrat authority for failing to reform services. It has started to reduce the cost of its management team and is offering redundancy to corridors full of staff.

But the city has a very high percentage of public sector jobs and the council fears there could be much worse ahead in Wednesday's Spending Review.

But when I visited its near neighbour, Cheshire West and Chester Council, it all felt very different.

Cheshire West was only created last year when there was a shake-up of local government in the county.

The new administration moved swiftly to change the way it did business and offer better value for hard-pressed council taxpayers.

The most obvious sign of change is its building.

The historic County Hall has new owners. Councillors have given way to classrooms, as students from Chester University now fill the corridors.

The council has meanwhile moved to a modern, open plan building known simply
as HQ.

Its Conservative Leader, Mike Jones, sits next to his chief executive in the middle of a room. Other senior officers sit nearby.

The building is two thirds the size of County Hall, yet more people work there.

It means running costs are lower and, I'm told, decision making is quicker.

But the changes go much deeper than that.

1,100 posts have been closed including 30 senior managers. The council says it has managed to save £53M of which £14M has been put back into services.

Cheshire West and Chester has £20M in reserves.

The council is hoping that it will continue to make enough savings to keep ahead of the cuts demanded by central government.

Even so it is still nervously awaiting the Spending Review. Other councils, much more so.

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The new Labour leader, Ed Miliband, clearly has confidence in . He has appointed him to the frontbench as part of the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ Affairs team.

But will Mr Woolas be an MP for much longer?

On 5 November two High Court judges return to Uppermill civic centre to pronounce on the MP's future.

Mr Woolas, the Labour MP for , is being challenged by his defeated Liberal Democrat candidate who believes he was cheated out of victory at the general election.

The hearings finished four weeks ago on 16 September and since then rumours have swirled.

I have been spending some time speaking to a few of those closely involved in the case and have a pretty good idea how they are feeling.

The Lib Dems do not want to give the impression they are about to win. Nevertheless they are quietly confident.

At the party conference in Liverpool they were handing out flyers headlined "By-Election Alert". I only know this because a colleague was handed one at a fringe event.

The inside pages were photocopies of Labour's controversial leaflets. At least the Liberal Democrats have found some use for them.

And the party has also been advertising for interns for a possible by-election campaign.

The Conservatives too are hopeful of an election. Talks have taken place between the local party and London.

The Tories believe with some justification that it would be an election fight between them and Labour. They do not think the Lib Dems would win.

As for Labour, there is a mix of emotion at the top of the local party as they wait for the judges to return.

Some are confident they are going to win the case. Others, including Phil Woolas himself I'm told, are nervous.

The party's legal team is already planning to appeal if the judgement goes against them.

It's not clear what form an appeal would take. Perhaps it could be on a strict point of law to the Appeal Court; possibly to the European Court on the right to free speech.

There have been suggestions that alternative Labour candidates are already being lined-up. I do not believe that is anything more than rumour.

Even though Labour is facing the extraordinary possibility of defeat, the party fully stands by its allegations.

Indeed it is preparing to send a dossier of evidence against the Liberal Democrats to the Director of Public Prosecutions.

All depends on the judgements being crafted in London, probably about now.

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