The trouble with strategies: Bridging the gap between ambition and local needs

The Modern Industrial Strategy, Local Growth Plans, Economic Development Strategies…who doesn’t love a strategy? The trouble is, they can be both enormously helpful and enormously unhelpful. Let me explain.

Ideally, local, regional and national strategies would fit inside each other like Russian dolls. In practice, trying to get them to do so is more like trying to force a wet tent back into its carrying case on a particularly windy day.

Nationally-important sectors might not be that important regionally and certainly not locally. This is especially the case in under-performing areas which, if they had those sectors as mainstays of their economy, would not be under-performing.

So, trying to align sub-national strategies with national strategies can be problematic and even a little deflating. Some combined/mayoral authorities have got round this tricky issue by publishing their Local Growth Plans in advance of the Modern Industrial Strategy. Clever.

But what should go into an economic development strategy/growth plan and, more particularly, how can the ambitions they set out be justified?

Recently, the estimable Tom Bridges posted (on LinkedIn) a reminder of the ODPM’s “Guide to Improving the Economic Evidence Base supporting Regional Economic and Spatial Strategies”, first published in 2005, and which he and other Arup colleagues had put together.

It set out five areas for improving the economic evidence base:

• Better understanding of causal factors and drivers of change.
• Using longitudinal evidence to better understand long-run structural trends and future scenarios.
• Better and more transparent interpretation of data analysis and modelling.
• A more robust approach to market-testing, to improve understanding and questioning of the economic implications of adopting specific policy positions on the scale, type and location of development.
• Better integration and synthesis of thematic, sector-based, and spatially-focused evidence to strengthen understanding of linkages and inter-relationships between policies.

Respectfully, I would add the following:

• The need to consider the reliability/robustness of certain evidence. Some data lags are very unhelpful; some data are skewed by external events or shocks, such as the Covid pandemic; and some data are based on small sample sizes, especially at the local level.
• The willingness to accept that some evidence might be telling you things you would rather not hear (and confronting that). You might be weak in areas in which you’d like to be strong; the terribly unsexy but terribly important Foundation Economy might account for a large percentage of jobs etc.
• The need to balance optimism and pragmatism. Not everywhere is going to be a world centre for AI, so don’t pretend that’s a realistic ambition where there is no evidence to back it up.
• Just be yourself. That doesn’t mean you can’t evolve into something different, but don’t pretend you’re something that you’re not. There’s a lot to be said for authenticity.

And if that isn’t sufficiently uncomfortable, try this for size: economic development strategies ought to more fully recognise social and environmental factors. For example, I’ve written economic development strategies for areas where levels of economic inactivity are uncomfortably high, driven mainly by long-term sickness and people having caring responsibilities.

If you want those people to be available for work, you’ll need to make substantial investments in public health, the NHS, childcare and social care. Putting on training courses and offering them help with their CVs isn’t really going to cut it. And do you really want to build along the Lincolnshire/Norfolk coast (and some other places besides) given expectations of rising sea levels within the next 25 years?

Keith Burge is Principal at Smarter Economics. Keith is Chairing a panel discussion at the iED Annual Conference, themed Good Growth: Driving the UK economy with investment in our regions and communities, on 25^th November. Book your place here.

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