Our View from Outside London - Three Insights

We love working with London and Major City clients but we are also delighted to be also increasingly working with clients outside urban centres as well.

Our main focuses are helping councils set up external funding and inward investment teams and leading on Levelling Up funding bids.

We wanted to share a three insights from our time outside the ‘Big Smokes’.

1. The net zero economy

Whilst public funding in the UK dwarfs that being provided by governments in France and Germany, there is a lot of activity in this area, with the private sector being the major agent of change.

The Thames Estuary are providing stellar leadership in this area - how the transition will work in practical terms and what this will mean for the economy. They have produced a really useful Hydrogen Routemap.

There is space for energy production and there are the industries that would use energy sources such as hydrogen and there is also the access to renewables and the possibility of a crucial piece of the future solution - affordable Green Hydrogen. So we foresee more R&D and innovation jobs moving to these areas. Speaking of which…

2. The quandary at the heart of the Levelling Up Fund

The excellent Institute for Government paper, published last year, sets out the core question at the heart of what levelling up means as being ‘are we talking about levelling up people or places?’.

Our feeling is that the government’s mind is firmly on the ‘places’ side of this argument and that in the forthcoming White Paper they will set out how they want high-skilled and high GVA economic clusters in every area of the country.

The core question is - how do we encourage this to happen?  There are two philosophies and this is where we think a big quandary in Levelling Up lies: (1) we get there through investing in skills development, (2) we attract high GVA industries to parts of the country and then help connect local people up with these opportunities.

Both of these come with challenges - skills development takes years (decades) and attracting companies relies on there being a compelling private sector case.

We think that the key to this are the institutions that sit in the middle of this area - universities - which we predict will become increasingly important to local economic performance. So the question will arise - what do we do about those areas without them.

3. The challenge of modal shift to active transport

It is obvious that it’s a huge challenge outside the major cities encouraging people to use public and active transport.  Without transport systems in place, the car is just the only viable option for peoples’ needs.

This will change with more housing developments coming into satellite towns and the concept of the ‘15 minute’ growing outside cities, but the scale of the challenge is huge.  It is also amplified by the upcoming ban on pure petrol or diesel vehicles taking effect in 2030. The costs of EV infrastructure and vehicles will need to come down significantly in the next 10-15 years, and even if they do we will need to completely rethink transport.

We are working with one client on a revolutionary idea looking at how to grow an active transport culture from the bottom-up.  That is, taking existing assets and working out how to use these as a platform to attract public and private sector funding - watch this space!

If you’re interested in hearing more about our capabilities in these areas, or discussing projects where you think we can help, please drop our founder Duncan Ray a line on duncan@remarkable.city.