What We Do

Regional Development Agencies promote and enable economic growth in England's regions by creating the conditions to grow businesses and by helping to create additional, better quality, higher-paid jobs. 

Operating at the regional level, we work to align the critical mass of organisations needed to address large-scale economic challenges and opportunities - focusing all available resources and energies on tackling agreed economic development priorities.  There are essentially three main components to our work:

1. Gather evidence and create Regional Economic Strategies

• We gather intelligence and analyse the strengths and weaknesses of our economies.
• We use this evidence base to broker collective understanding and agreement about economic challenges, opportunities and priorities.
• These challenges, opportunities and priorities are set out in Regional Economic Strategies, which provide agreed frameworks for collective, multi-partner, cross-sector actions that will deliver regional economic growth.

2. Invest our own resources wisely

• We target our own funding where it makes most impact, delivers maximum benefit to local businesses and communities and helps to deliver our share of the objectives of the Regional Economic Strategy.
• We have a decade of experience and expertise in strategic planning, economic infrastructure provision, identifying skills for business development, business support, innovation, property development, sustainable and low-carbon development, UK and European funding, project appraisal and impact eavluation.
• We understand how to tackle market failure and how to exploit emerging opportunities.

3. Influence others and aligning activity

• We work in partnership and use our influence to align activity, improve efficiency and maximise effectiveness.
• We provide capacity and expertise to enable businesses, universities and local authorities to deliver the best solutions for their own local economies.
• We help to deliver integrated solutions that generate maximum benefit to local businesses, people and places.

Regional Development Agencies offer outstanding value for money

Independent evaluation by PricewaterhouseCoopers has shown that for every £1 invested by RDAs, we have to date generated £4.50 in return. This figure rises to £6.40 when future returns are included. This is recognised as being at the very top end of returns for public sector investment.