Delivering the Right Kind of Growth, Fairly Shared

I was fortunate to be among a community of policymakers, academics and practitioners at the Bennett School of Public Policy Annual Conference in Cambridge last week, hearing from leading thinkers working on the thorny policy problems facing governments in the UK and around the world. The conference was connected by a common thread: the Bennett School’s focus on delivering the right kind of growth, fairly shared. The programme included sessions on evidence-based policymaking in polarised times, how governments can deliver growth, and the use of AI in public services, as well as an impassioned conversation with Andy Burnham, who made the case for devolution and the virtues of place-based policymaking. The day concluded with Philip Rycroft sharing findings from his recent review of foreign financial influence in UK politics, and a keynote from former EU ambassador João Vale de Almeida on the geopolitical pressures reshaping the context for domestic policymaking in the UK.

There was a striking consistency in the underlying challenges that surfaced across very different discussions. Whether the topic was housing supply, AI, devolution or industrial strategy, speakers returned to questions of trust, institutional capability and coordination, and the relationship between national policy and lived experience in places. Five insights stood out as especially relevant for policymakers working to deliver inclusive growth and public sector reform:

Growth must be visible and felt

Governments can no longer rely solely on headline indicators as evidence of growth. Progress needs to be visible in the systems people rely on in their everyday lives, including housing, transport, skills pathways and health outcomes. Economic agendas that focus solely on improving headline indicators such as GDP - which was never intended to be a measure of welfare - risk overlooking how growth is distributed and the issues of affordability, access to services, and opportunities that shape how people actually experience the economy. 

In Greater Manchester, this has meant moving away from what Andy Burnham described as “extractive growth” towards investment more closely linked to participation in the labour market and the quality of local services. Integrated public transport shows how ambitions for growth translate into real improvements in how people move through their local economies and connect to employment and essential services. The ambition for inclusive growth will be judged by whether investment widens participation in economic activity across places rather than concentrating its benefits within them.

Efficiency cannot be a substitute for public value

Efficiency may be the most easily quantifiable measure of AI’s “success” in the public sector; however, faster decisions or lower administrative costs do not necessarily translate into better outcomes, particularly in services such as planning, where communities rightly expect meaningful public consultation and confidence in how those decisions are made. The ability to deploy AI tools to process planning consultations more quickly is clearly valuable, but not if it comes at the expense of trust in the process itself. In the broader discussion of AI adoption, the pressure to demonstrate productivity gains can crowd out questions about fairness, accountability, and trust in democratic institutions. Reform efforts are more likely to garner support when they focus on what public services are intended to achieve, rather than on what can be most readily measured.

Trust is an essential ingredient for reform

Trust was repeatedly discussed as a precondition to successful reform. For most people, periods of rapid technological or social change generate a sense of uncertainty and insecurity as much as they do opportunity. Effective leadership should seek to build trust by recognising those anxieties and responding to them directly, rather than assuming the benefits of change will speak for themselves.

For example, framing the benefits of AI in public services in the language of efficiency and cost savings will not engender the trust needed to build public support for its use. People want to understand how decisions are made with AI, how its use will affect their jobs, where accountability sits, and whether it will improve the quality of the public services they rely on.

As AI becomes more deeply embedded in the delivery of public services, policymakers will need to treat public trust as a practical requirement for implementation, alongside the more familiar technical pillars of data, infrastructure, and compute. This is particularly important for public services, where provision is universal, risk thresholds are lower, and confidence in decision-making processes is harder to rebuild once lost.

Central government needs the courage to act, and the confidence to let go

Many of the pressures constraining growth today point towards the need for a more confident and ambitious role from the state. These pressures include the vulnerability of global supply chains, the growing importance of technological sovereignty, and the role stagnant living standards continue to play in political instability in the UK and abroad. Responding to challenges of this scale requires courage from central government and a willingness to make bold, long-term strategic choices about housing, infrastructure, industrial capability and security.  

Central government also needs the confidence to let go, by allowing cities and regions to deliver the public services their communities need and to have their hands on the economic levers required to translate national priorities into local, inclusive growth. Partnerships between regions are becoming increasingly important in this context, with initiatives such as the Cambridge x Manchester Innovation Partnership illustrating how collaboration between leading clusters can support the wider diffusion of innovation across the country. Delivering inclusive growth, therefore, requires a state that is prepared both to act decisively where coordination is national and to share responsibility where delivery is local.

Growth now requires navigating a more fragmented political landscape

Geopolitical instability is increasingly shaping the environment in which domestic economic policy is made in the UK. The past decade has been marked by both a weakening of cooperation among states and growing fragmentation within them, as trust in institutions has declined and political debate has become more polarised around identity and place. 

The current cross-government focus on economic growth reflects an ambition to address stagnating living standards and regional economic disparities: conditions that were central to the political and economic context of the Brexit vote. With the tenth anniversary of the Brexit referendum approaching, this may be a moment to reflect more deeply on how questions of inclusive growth, sovereignty and regional inequality are connected. Delivering sustained inclusive growth will require an economic agenda suited to a more contested international environment and a more divided domestic landscape. Governments must be able to demonstrate that growth can expand opportunity across places whose economic trajectories have diverged over recent decades, and, in doing so, help rebuild trust that growth can deliver for more people in more parts of the country. 

For local and combined authorities, the key takeaways are:

• Growth is increasingly judged by whether places can demonstrate credible pathways from investment to productivity and participation in their local economies. This underscores the importance of strong economic analysis, focused investment pipelines, and deeper partnerships with private investors to demonstrate how transport, skills, housing, and infrastructure translate into access to work and opportunity.
• Deploying AI to increase efficiency or reduce administrative costs in public services will not, in isolation, generate public support. Local and combined authorities will need to demonstrate and communicate how new technologies strengthen public value, oversight and accountability in the services people rely on.
• Policymakers will need to treat public trust as a practical requirement for implementing AI in public services, alongside the more familiar technical pillars of data, infrastructure, and compute.
• Political fragmentation means governments can no longer rely on national narratives about growth alone; confidence in economic change will be built or lost through the institutions and services people encounter locally.