Black Country must feel benefits of funding says Prime Minister

His announcement today of £138 million will provide the spark to fire a revival of this industrial heartland.

Britain has never needed the Black Country more. After the disaster in financial services exposed the weaknesses of a country that relied too heavily on the City of London, the Prime Minister has rightly concentrated on the need to make things the world wants to buy.

But this is not a return to the days of well-paid, unskilled labour. The thousands of new jobs on the way will require the best and brightest workers.

They need homes to live in and the best transport system to get to and from work and to get the goods out.

And they need the incentive to spend their wages where they live, hence the revamps of the Wolverhampton Civic Halls and Grand Theatre.

Meanwhile it goes some way towards addressing the belief that all the main parties are obsessed with London and the big cities like Birmingham and Manchester, at the expense of the rest of the country.

The timing of this announcement raises eyebrows, of course.

We are 10 months away from the General Election and the West Midlands will be a key battleground between the Tories and Labour.

But we do not look a gift horse in the mouth.

The political impetus to see real results before next May will hopefully provide the incentive for the money to be used immediately and in a way where results can be seen by all.

The worst thing would be for it to sit in some council or quango's coffers while various focus groups, public sector partnerships or other talking shops wrangle over what to do with it.

We have faith that that will not be the case.

This has been a very long time coming.

Over the past few years, in a time of austerity and misery, this sort of funding has been a very rare thing.

That was to be expected as the first and most pressing priority was stopping the country's debts from continuing to spiral out of control.

But a prosperous future cannot be built on cuts.

This area has shown in the past that it is more than capable of dragging itself up by its boot straps.

All anyone has been asking for was the initial investment to get things moving.

It's time to get to work.

Staffordshire and the Black Country are set to receive £221m. Read about the grant here.

Read about the £30m revamp to junction 10 of the M6 as part of the grant.