Enterprise zones - implementing the unworkable

Enterprise Zones owe their origins to an analysis of economic decline, particularly in urban areas, which attributes this to government intervention, regulation and taxation. Their earliest exponent was Professor Peter Hall, an erstwhile Fabian socialist who in 1977 proposed the creation of mini Hong Kongs in the depressed inner cities, areas free of all government regulation and taxation, where free enterprise would be given full rein. The idea has had considerable appeal to the exponents of free enterprise on both sides of the Atlantic. In 1978 Sir Geoffrey Howe, then Opposition Spokesman on economic affairs, unveiled a modified version of the proposal in a speech given on the Isle of Dogs in London. Howe proposed 'test market areas or laboratories in which to enable fresh policies to prime the pump of prosperity and to establish their potential for doing so elsewhere'.