LED Confidential

In this Espresso Shot episode, David and Mike unpack why, in the shadow of an estimated 2,700 heat-related deaths in England and Wales this summer, longer-term adaptation to heatwaves still lacks clear strategic leadership in local economic development. They explore how heat mortality and productivity loss concentrate in older housing stock, deprived neighbourhoods and outdoor trades, and contrast the near total absence of statutory duties for heat with the governance architecture built around flood risk.  For LED and placemaking professionals, it's a call to treat heat adaptation as economic infrastructure, not just a cost.

In this Espresso Shot episode, David and Mike ask what Andy Burnham's "Manchesterism" actually means for the rest of the UK now that he's setting policy from Downing Street. They unpack the concept and explore if it can or should be  transplanted to geographies without  Greater Manchester's nine years of mayoralty and 25 years of AGMA before it. They discuss how the same policy goal can demand different delivery models in different places, and ask if national government is about to reward places that already have institutional capacity while leaving others further behind. For LED and placemaking professionals, it's a sharp prompt to map their own convening architecture before reaching for the Manchester playbook.

In this guest episode, David and Mike are joined by Mark Sandford, senior research analyst at the House of Commons Library, to explore what MPs actually want to know about devolution, local government finance and place. Mark explains how the Library's strictly impartial briefings have shaped debate on the English Devolution and Community Empowerment Act, the Fair Funding Review 2.0,  Local Government Reorganisation, and how mayoral devolution has shifted in under a decade from political suspicion to cross party orthodoxy. The conversation covers what a move from discretionary grants to assigned tax revenues could mean for the mayor–Whitehall relationship, the risk of a democratic deficit in reorganised local authorities, and how a more fragmented five-party political landscape may change what MPs need to know. LED and placemaking practitioners will take away a clearer sense of how to frame evidence for Westminster audiences.

In this Espresso Shot episode, David and Mike explore whether Mayoral Strategic Authorities can genuinely deliver whole-geography growth or whether the devolution model is structurally biased toward cities and large urban projects. They examine the gap created by Defra's non-participation in Integrated Settlements, which leaves MSAs with formal rural responsibilities under the D&CE but without equivalent rural funding levers. David sets out why appraisal  and business case development systematically disadvantages dispersed, rural geographies where fewer beneficiaries, smaller project pipelines, and thinner institutional capacity mean that they routinely lose out in any funding model designed around scale.  
Mike explores what LED professionals can do now, before any reform, including investment in the development of a rural project pipeline and pushing the right-to-request agenda into Defra territory. The May 2026 local election results, which showed a growing divergence between core cities and their rural hinterlands, add political urgency to a structural economic challenge.

In this guest episode, David and Mike are joined by Dr Adrian Johnston MBE, Innovation Commissioner for Innovation City Belfast, to explore whether inclusive innovation can be measured in practice. Adrian explains how Innovation City Belfast, a partnership of seven anchor institutions built around the £1bn Belfast Region City Deal, moved beyond GVA and patents toward a broader "inclusion capital" framework covering economic, human, cultural and social capital, using proxies like "social graphs" and self-efficacy to track whether prosperity is genuinely shared. The conversation covers the Belfast Inclusive Futures visioning process, the city's ambition to be the UK's healthiest and most productive city by 2035, the spatial equity challenge of city-centre-led innovation, and how devolved regions outside London and Greater Manchester might frame policy differently.