I’m Dr Glenn Athey, an economic development consultant and policy advisor with over 31 years’ experience working at the intersection of research, policy and practice. I specialise in local, urban and regional economic development, working with local and national government, combined authorities, universities, and major investors to design better policies and programmes.
My work spans the full spectrum of economic development: from strategies, economic analysis and policy frameworks to Green Book business cases and programme evaluations. I’ve led major strategies, including Leicester and Leicestershire’s Economic Recovery Strategy, the London Stansted Cambridge Corridor Economic Strategy, and green economy action plans for combined authorities. Recent projects include FDI propositions for London boroughs, skills strategies across Scotland and England, and net-zero pathway programmes.
I bring both academic rigour and practical delivery experience to this work. I spent 15 years in academia, policy and government organisations, including as Head of Research at the Centre for Cities during its founding years. I’ve also worked directly in delivery, including as Interim Executive Director of the Greater Cambridge Greater Peterborough LEP, where I operationalised the organisation and deployed over £15m in growth funding.
Alongside consultancy, I’m launching Economic Development World in December 2025 – an online community of practice and professional learning platform for UK economic development practitioners. After three decades in this field, I’ve seen how fragmented our collective knowledge has become, and I’m working to rebuild that professional infrastructure.
Becoming an LPIP Hub Fellow
I’ve witnessed both boom times and lean years in UK economic development – periods of significant investment and capacity building, followed by cuts that eroded institutional memory and expertise. My recent work for the Local Government Association, reviewing urban policy and local growth funding, crystallised something I’d observed throughout my career: we keep reinventing the wheel, but each time there seems to be fewer spokes!
The fundamental problem is policy churn without learning. New initiatives are launched with insufficient regard for what worked (or didn’t) in previous programmes. Good practice gets lost. The communities that need effective economic development most – those facing persistent deprivation and declining economic performance – pay the price.
The Local Policy Innovation Partnership represents something different: a deliberate effort to curate knowledge, bridge academic research and practitioner experience, and design better policies through rigorous evidence and collaboration. For someone who has spent their career trying to improve how we do economic development, this mission resonates deeply. I was delighted to become an LPIP Hub Fellow.
My Work as an LPIP Hub Fellow
My LPIP research tackles a central question that has troubled me throughout my career: why does the UK repeatedly launch new policies to address regional economic disparities, only to see them fail to deliver transformational change?
This isn’t about political point-scoring. It’s about understanding the systemic factors that undermine policy effectiveness – weak evidence bases, insufficient implementation capacity, poor policy design, lack of institutional continuity, and failure to learn from past experience. If we can identify these failure mechanisms, we can build a toolkit to help policymakers and practitioners mitigate them over the next decade.
The research combines literature review, policy and performance data analysis, and a survey of economic development, regeneration and community development practitioners from local government and delivery organisations across the UK. Findings are expected in early 2026.
The aim is practical: not another critique of what’s wrong, but actionable insights that can help the next generation of policies work better. This means understanding not just policy design, but the organisational capabilities, funding mechanisms, and governance arrangements that enable (or prevent) effective delivery.
Final Thoughts
What attracted me to the LPIP Hub was its commitment to pragmatic, policy-focused research that directly addresses real-world challenges. Too often, academic research and practitioner experience exist in parallel universes. The LPIP model – bringing together researchers, policymakers, and practitioners as Fellows working on agile research projects – offers a better way.
Local and regional disparities in economic performance and living standards continue to widen. Productivity remains stubbornly low. The climate emergency demands economic transformation. Effective local economic development has never mattered more.
The LPIP Hub and wider network have a critical role to play in supporting the kind of evidence-informed, implementation-focused policy development that can actually make a difference. This matches perfectly with my professional outlook and the way I work. It’s fantastic to be part of this community.
This blog was written by Dr Glenn Athey, Economic Development Consultant.
Find out more about the Local Policy Innovation Partnership Hub.
Disclaimer:
The views expressed in this post are those of the author and not necessarily those of City-REDI or the University of Birmingham.