How’s your plan to attract private investment?
In our discussions with The Good Economy, and through the Place Based Impact Investment Network we are increasingly struck by the mismatch between how priority local investments are worked up and what institutional investors are looking for. There is a clear desire from the institutional investor community to consider place-based UK projects, but these projects do need to be investor ready.
The current paucity of projects worked up for private investment is hardly surprising. The last decade has seen Local Authorities bounced from one public sector funding scheme to another. These funding schemes have each involved new rules, a competition for funding, and more hoops to jump through to achieve compliance.
The impact of this endless bouncing has created an environment where long term place making has been difficult to consider, where public funding competitions have crowded out the space to consider the role of the private sector, and where some good projects remain unfunded.
There is now a space to pause. There is limited time before the next election and a new economic development framework post-election is likely to take time to implement. It is therefore unlikely that new public sector funding schemes will come forward in the next 18 months. There is however a funding source keen to unlock priority projects, and this is the institutional investor community.
Our work with The Good Economy in this area has established a number of areas where the investment community is keen to engage. Housing, low carbon, commercial development and infrastructure are areas of keen interest, but this is not an exhaustive list. Critically the work has identified the institutional investors who are most keen to engage and invest at a local level.
The work with institutional investors has also highlighted how projects which have some public money allocated but where inflation has eroded the viability of the project can be delivered / rescued from the jaws of defeat.
The funding landscape has its complexities. The appropriate investors will vary according to, amongst other things, project scale, asset class, return, scale and duration of investment. Their information requirements are likely to focus to a greater extent than the public sector on the evidence behind the funding projections, the certainty of delivery, the quality of local governance but in essence they are interested in the same investment projects that have been previously submitted to the different guises of Levelling Up.
The Good Economy has been leading this conversation with its investors and shaping impact assessments to understand that the funds deliver what they set out achieve. The work between Mickledore and The Good Economy is now helping public bodies to prioritise and assess the suitability of their projects for private investment. Separately we are considering how we build our knowledge of investible projects across the country.
We have worked through projects across the UK and if there is a conversation that would be useful to start exploring the role that institutional investment can play in delivering your projects we would be delighted to discuss this with you at nwilcock@regionaldevelopment.co.uk or on 07747 085400