I joined David Marlow and Mike Spicer on the LED Confidential podcast recently, and we went straight at the question that opened the episode: why do so many places struggle to close the gap between what they set out to do and what actually happens on the ground?

My answer is not that places lack ambition. I am all for ambitious places and ambitious statements. Where we fall down is articulating how we will deliver those ambitions, and then designing the interventions, mechanisms and services to invest in change.

We have all listened to mayoral speeches and read the growth plans, then thought: I can see you delivering perhaps 20 per cent of this. What about the rest?

Part of this is performative politics, the impression that announcing growth produces growth. Part of it is structural. Fifteen years of austerity have hollowed out delivery capacity and professional capability in economic development. Many of today’s practitioners never experienced the larger, well-funded programmes of the 1990s and 2000s, so delivery at scale is something they have read about rather than done.

That is one of the main reasons I wrote The Local and Regional Economic Development Handbook. Every chapter pairs the foundational knowledge with practical examples and case studies showing what delivery actually looks like in successful places. If you have the ambitions, the book shows how they break down into tangible practice.

Listen to the full episode of LED Confidential at https://www.ledconfidential.co.uk/episodes/episode/4b07c600/tooling-up-the-profession-what-local-economic-development-practitioners-need-now

Find the handbook at https://lredhandbook.com

Register to be notified when the paperback edition of the handbook is out at https://economic-development-world.kit.com/cc13e121c8

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