Building the knowledge infrastructure for LED: The Local and Regional Economic Development Handbook
- David Marlow
- Jun 16
- 6 min read
Glenn Athey grew up in North Tyneside in the 1970s watching an economy dismantle itself. Roughly one in five of his classmates had a father made redundant during deindustrialisation. He was taught metalwork and woodwork — skills calibrated for ship-building and heavy engineering that were already disappearing beneath his feet. He went on to study economics, then political economy, and spent the next thirty-plus years trying to answer the question that experience planted in him: how did this happen, why did the policy responses fail, and what does it actually take to reinvent a place economy from the inside?
His answers have just been published. The Local and Regional Economic Development Handbook is 543 pages of hard-won practitioner knowledge; written the way a practitioner thinks rather than the way academics write. It is the resource Glenn wished existed when he started. It is also, inevitably, a snapshot: a codification of what the profession has learned up to the point of publication.
UK practitioners have had strong relevant texts written from an academic starting point — think former LEDC guests like Andy Pike, John Tomaney – two of the three Local and Regional Development 2016 authors. But there has been nothing comparable grounded in the institutional realities UK practitioners actually inhabit: the Combined Authority, the devolution deal, the growth plan, the delivery gap. Glenn's handbook fills that space. Our conversation about it surfaces at least five things worth developing further.
1. The strategy-delivery gap isn't a resourcing problem, it's a culture problem
Glenn is direct: the problem isn't ambition — it's the absence of any serious account of how ambition becomes action. What mechanisms? What sequencing? What investment in delivery capacity? He calls it “performative politics”: the deeply embedded cultural assumption that saying something constitutes doing it. His contemporary example is pointed: this government invokes "growth" constantly, and as an economist he struggles to identify the actual policies that would produce it at the pace or scale being implied.
His prescription is to ensure every strategy he writes includes a delivery section with concrete delivery examples from comparable places. The handbook is an attempt to give the profession that same grounding at scale, with each chapter illustrating the points Glenn makes.
2. The handbook captures what we know but curiosity is how we learn what we don't
The handbook is Glenn’s act of codification, capturing the profession's accumulated knowledge as of the moment of writing. That is genuinely valuable. But the conditions LED professionals are navigating right now — AI disrupting skills systems faster than strategies can absorb, devolution creating governance geographies with no established playbook, healthy life expectancy falling in ways that rewrite growth assumptions — are precisely the conditions for which retrospective codification provides the least traction.
Glenn knows this. His discussion of AI makes the point precisely: it's powerful when you can tightly instruct it and curate its evidence base, but it cannot triangulate and assess the relative validity of fifty databases, or tell you what the numbers mean for a specific place at a specific moment. That requires human judgement: the situated, experiential knowledge that a handbook can gesture towards but cannot transmit.
Which is why the most important quality Glenn identifies in the best economic developers isn't knowledge. It's curiosity. Get out of the office. Test your theories with stakeholders. Don't take anyone's word for anything. He offers a vivid example: an FE college principal describes a rich programme of work experience and employer engagement; the students say they'd have loved work experience but weren't offered it, or that their placement was stacking shelves in a supermarket. The gap between the official account and lived reality is a knowledge problem and it's one the handbook, by its nature, cannot solve. Curiosity is what closes it. The handbook tells you what to look for. Curiosity is what you do when what you find doesn't match.
This is where LED Confidential enters the frame. Mike and I established LEDC to generate a structurally different kind of knowledge infrastructure: real-time, dialogic, anticipatory. What Glenn's handbook does through codification, LEDC tries to do through conversation — making visible what practitioners are encountering in the field before it has been systematised, peer-reviewed or published. Both matter. Neither is sufficient without the other.
3. Political volatility isn't new but the profession's response to it needs to be
Mike pushed Glenn on whether today's practitioners need to be more politically savvy than previous generations. His answer is nuanced: the core competencies haven't changed as much as the institutional churn might suggest. Combined Authorities have real parallels with RDAs: both are / were strategic funding bodies that contract to delivery organisations, leaning on evidence and the Green Book to filter political pet projects. Economic development has always been political.
But the political arithmetic has changed. The post-May 7th landscape with its five-party politics, Reform-controlled hinterlands around Labour-led city regions, fundamentally incompatible worldviews sitting around MCA cabinet tables creates a specific challenge. Glenn's argument that Combined Authorities need to become great learning organisations is right – enabled and supported by an LED and place making community of practice. The harder question is how our community helps to build a learning organisation when its governing coalition can't agree on what success looks like.
4. Inclusion is at the back of the handbook but is it also at the back of the queue?
The handbook's structure: foundational economics, enterprise, innovation, skills and then inclusion and climate in the final chapters reflects how the profession currently operates. LED itself continues to be constrained by departmental silos, funding streams, and the limits of what devolved institutions are currently empowered to do.
LEDC has repeatedly made the case that LED’s operating principles are changing fundamentally: AI, energy and water, climate, and inclusion are the conditions of possibility for everything else. Glenn's own example is Greater Manchester's integration of health and employment, which is significant precisely because it requires cross-boundary authority most combined authorities don't yet have. The devolution architecture needs to deliver that: not just fiscal flexibility for already-advantaged places, but genuine preventative power for those where the structural conditions for inclusion failure are most deeply embedded. Future editions of the handbook will surely have a different structure to the 2026 1st edition.
5. The ten-year itch? Don't waste a decade arguing about the architecture
Glenn ends on an upbeat and hopeful note: for the first time in more than a generation, there are major democratically accountable institutions in England at the local and intermediate levels with real responsibilities for the economy, inclusion and sustainability. The enabling legislation is good. The institutions exist. Something can be built.
But the window is probably ten years before the UK's political cycle reaches for its next reinvention of local and regional economic development. That's not pessimism. That’s the lived experience of Glenn, Mike and myself. And it means the profession cannot afford to spend those ten years debating governance architecture while the delivery gap widens. The handbook is Glenn's contribution to making those ten years count. The question for every Combined Authority, every LED team, and every professional network is what theirs is.
Concluding remarks
I agree with Glenn’s opening proposition that the handbook is the codification the profession needed: a fixed point of reference, a shared foundation, a starting line. But a starting line is not a destination. The conditions LED professionals are navigating are changing faster than any handbook can track, and the knowledge that will determine whether the next ten years succeed is being generated right now, in practice, in conversation, in the gap between what strategies promise and what communities experience.
Building the infrastructure that makes that live knowledge visible, transmissible and cumulative — professional networks, action research programmes, and yes, podcasts that take the profession seriously are as important as the handbook itself. Glenn has given us an exceptional foundation. What we build on it is up to us.
What is your organisation doing to generate new professional knowledge — not just transmit what it has already decided it knows?
Check out Glenn's handbook at lredhandbook.com and his wider work at Economic Development World.
Comments