It is easy to be distracted from the core vision and plan for a variety of reasons. National and regional issues can sometimes dominate agendas, but what really matters to our communities?

At South Lakeland, a recent performance monitoring report gave an insightful look into the state of the district. It gave many good levels of performance against the national average, for example, levels of education and levels of qualification attainment are significantly better than the national averages and the number of people without qualifications fell in recent years.

Yet our local enterprise partnership reports a skills shortage. It is not that people are not skilled or qualified, it is just that there are not enough of them and this is exacerbated by the lack of public transport in rural areas.