In a new series of Blogs, we hear from new City-REDI Associate Mike Spicer.
Across a variety of roles in the public and private sectors, I have spent over twenty years working on why some places and some firms do better than others, and what policy should and actually can do about it.
I have been a researcher. I have been a lobbyist. I have run a national business survey, sat on funding review panels, briefed Ministers, and spent a lot of time in rooms with leaders in further and higher education, local government officers, and business owners who all describe the same local economy in completely different language.
I am now Managing Director of PolicyDepartment, an economic development consultancy I set up in 2020. Before that I was Director of Economics, Policy and Research at the British Chambers of Commerce, where I led the Quarterly Economic Survey, the UK’s largest privately run survey of business sentiment, and a research programme covering international trade, employment regulation, skills, business costs and the drivers of investment. I served on the Steering Group of the Enterprise Research Centre until I left the BCC in 2020.
What connects all of it is an interest in the point where enterprise policy, place strategy and economic performance meet. That is also, more or less, where City-REDI sits, which is why becoming an associate appealed to me.
Where my research interests sit
Two of City-REDI’s themes map closely onto my work: business and people.
On the business side, my interest is in firm-level dynamics and how they add up to regional performance. Specifically: how do businesses actually experience the institutions that are meant to help them grow and what changes when those institutions are redesigned?
In recent years I’ve had several opportunities to test that in practice. I’ve worked with Combined Authorities on major reviews of business support programmes, including in the transition to a post-LEP world, and covering a broad range of intervention types from business advisory and high-growth coaching to capital grants; place-based equity investment funds to inward investment; and schemes focused on sectors or business types like social enterprise.
A common theme from these reviews is the disconnect between the perspective of policymakers and how business leaders see and experience the outside world, especially what they see as difficult or easy in the age of AI and internet search. There is, in my view, a need for enterprise policy at all levels of geography to catch up with where businesses are today. They exist in the world of digital marketing strategies which shapes their expectations about what a good ‘customer journey’ should look like. They have easy but expensive access to working capital from new credit providers that creates both new opportunities and risks for early-stage businesses. And they have much cheaper access to advanced information and advice through AI (however flawed) that means how they search for support and find it is unrecognisable today from just a decade ago.
On the people side, my interest is in how regional skills systems respond to what employers say they need and how much gets lost in translation on the way. Recently I’ve led work on some Local Skills Improvement Plans in England and similar strategies across Great Britain.
The shift to a largely online world of external recruitment has opened up massive opportunities for better understanding labour and skills needs in local economies. We can say, with greater confidence than ever before, which job roles, skills, and qualifications are in demand and hard to recruit. We can now analyse, at scale, the external recruitment histories of entire sectors and track how the qualities and skills demanded of candidates in job advertisements change over time and space. We can map these shifts onto the provision of education and training so that funders and providers can respond according to their priorities.
What I hope to do as an associate
Three things, roughly.
First, I want to bring practitioner evidence into the research. Consultancy generates a lot of primary material: survey data, stakeholder interviews, programme reviews that sit in a client folder. Some of that deserves a wider airing, and academic scrutiny would make it better. Where data access can be agreed – it should be.
Second, I hope to contribute further to the funding question for regional economic development, especially as fiscal devolution is now on the cards for England. In 2024 I played a leading role in an LGA-commissioned review of UK growth funds, looking at the Levelling Up Fund, UK Shared Prosperity Fund and Towns Fund alongside alternative models, and setting out a ten-step roadmap for reform. We argued for long-term allocations over competitions and for risk-based accountability rather than clunky upfront processes. The UK Government has since moved in that direction, and the Pride in Place programme picked up the recommendation for ten-year capital allocations. I would like to keep testing whether the reforms deliver what was claimed for them, and how this agenda can be further developed.
Third, I want to learn. City-REDI’s work on entrepreneurship, spinouts and scale-ups covers ground where my instincts are shaped by client work and could do with being challenged by larger research efforts.
Why this matters
The value of an institution like City-REDI is that it asks whether economic development interventions or strategies have worked and keeps asking after the consultants have gone. I hope to be useful to that, and play my part in disseminating frontier knowledge and research to our wider community of practice.
This blog was written by Mike Spicer, Managing Director of Policy Department and a City-REDI Associate.
Disclaimer: The views expressed in this post are those of the author and not necessarily those of City-REDI or the University of Birmingham.