The incoming Conservative Prime Minister must better support small businesses through Local Enterprise Partnerships (LEPs) if the UK is to ride the forthcoming recession, leadership candidates Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak have been warned.

In a thinly-veiled critique of outgoing Prime Minister Boris Johnson and sacked levelling up secretary Michael Gove, LEP Network chair Mark Bretton said the new Cabinet must make ‘resetting the relationship between Government and local business a priority'.