I attended UKREiiF for the first time this year and came away struck not just by the scale of the conference itself, but by the extent to which discussions kept returning to the practical mechanics of economic growth: infrastructure, energy, housing viability, planning reform, institutional capability and investment readiness.
The language of growth remains everywhere, but the focus seems to be shifting towards delivery. In fact, one phrase in one conversation summed up the direction of travel in economic development:
“I’m all about impact now.”
It sounds simple, but it captures something important about where economic development is heading. For years, parts of the sector have often measured activity rather than impact. Strategies launched. Events hosted. Funds announced. Partnerships formed. Those things still matter, but there is growing recognition that outputs are not the same as outcomes.
Increasingly, investors, governments and places are asking harder questions. What changed? What barriers were removed? What moved faster? What investment was unlocked? What became deliverable that previously was not? In other words, we’re moving from ‘what’ to ‘so what/now what?’
That shift was visible across much of UKREiiF. The conversations around data centres, for example, were not really about buildings. They were about energy systems, grid capacity, planning speed and national competitiveness. AI is accelerating demand for digital infrastructure at an extraordinary pace, but the places that benefit will not simply be those with available land. They will be the places that can coordinate infrastructure, permitting and delivery. Similarly, discussions around ports increasingly framed them not as logistics assets alone, but as strategic platforms for clean energy, industrial transformation and advanced manufacturing.
Infrastructure, in many ways, appears to have fully re-entered the economic development conversation. That matters because, for a period, parts of the sector became heavily focused on ecosystems, narratives and vision statements, sometimes without enough attention to the systems underneath that actually enable growth.
At UKREiiF, the underlying message felt much clearer: if places cannot solve for power, water, transport, viability and planning, growth strategies will increasingly stall.
The same realism extended to devolution and placemaking discussions. There is growing recognition that powers alone do not create growth. Institutional capability matters just as much. Some places now operate with a high degree of coordination between local authorities, universities, infrastructure providers and investors. Others remain fragmented. Investors notice the difference quickly. One of the strongest undercurrents throughout the conference was therefore confidence. Not confidence in the abstract, but confidence in a place’s ability to deliver.
There was also a growing recognition that successful regeneration cannot simply be something done to places from the top down. The most compelling conversations were often about pride in place, community confidence and ensuring local people can genuinely see, feel and experience the benefits of investment around them. That matters because economic development ultimately succeeds or fails through public acceptance and local benefit. If communities do not feel connected to growth, regeneration risks becoming something that happens around people rather than with them. I remember this best when the local community around a major city centre university campus development I worked on asked if they would be allowed in. Success has come because they were encouraged in.
That has major implications for how we measure success. Traditional economic development metrics such as jobs promoted, investment secured and floorspace delivered remain important. But they do not tell the full story of economic impact.
Increasingly, there is a need to understand the wider and longer-term value created through economic development interventions. That includes productivity growth, innovation capacity, research and development intensity, supply chain spillovers, export capability, business formation, skills development and the overall competitiveness of places and sectors.
Equally, impact often begins long before a project formally appears as an investment announcement. Has a place sharpened its proposition? Has it built trusted relationships with founders, investors and advisers before decisions are live? Has it connected firms into talent, universities, testbeds, infrastructure, customers and funding? Has it influenced the timing, scale, quality or probability of future investment decisions?
And when investments do happen, are they better because of that earlier intervention? Better jobs. Stronger R&D activity. Greater local supply chain integration. Higher productivity potential. Stronger alignment with emerging strategic sectors.
That is harder to measure than straightforward project counts or headline investment figures, but it may be where some of the most important economic development value now sits. It is the difference between measuring transactions alone and understanding the wider system effects and chain of influence that helped create them.
In many ways, the sector is rediscovering the idea of strategic added value, but with a much stronger emphasis on evidence, accountability and measurable outcomes.
That shift matters because economic development is becoming more complex, more interconnected and more delivery-focused. Clients increasingly need more than strategy documents or headline metrics. They need clearer evidence, sharper prioritisation, stronger propositions, credible impact frameworks and practical routes to delivery.
That, ultimately, is why we saw the need for OCO Economics: connecting economic evidence with investment, trade, innovation, talent and place delivery in a way that is practical, measurable and grounded in outcomes.
