Invest in Gloucestershire put county on the global map, says report

By Peter Davison

17 May 2023

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Dev Chakraborty

Invest in Gloucestershire, the £1 million inward investment project from GFirst LEP, has leveraged over £11 million of added value to the local economy over four years, according to an independent report.

The summative assessment conducted by KADA Research was commissioned as funding from the European Regional Development Fund came to an end.

The programme has focussed on attracting Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) into Gloucestershire in four strategic sectors - agri-tech, cyber-tech, advanced engineering & manufacturing, and renewable energy - to drive economic growth.

The motivation behind bidding for the ERDF funding and creating the project was to address the lack of FDI landing in Gloucestershire and the absence of a coherent offer to communicate on the global stage.

Businesses did not have the information and UK Government did not have a dedicated single point of contact or proposition to promote Gloucestershire’s offer.

The report says that the proactive and versatile approach of the project team, reacting to the external challenges faced during the past four years, is reflected in the results of the report which highlighted a vibrant and coherent dialogue to the global audience and key stakeholders, and put Gloucestershire on the 'global map'.

As a result of the findings, GFirst LEP has committed to the continuation of the Invest in Gloucestershire project.

Dev Chakraborty, Deputy Chief Executive of GFirst LEP said: “Launching a brand-new inward investment programme four years ago with the uncertainty of Brexit followed by Covid made it hugely challenging, but I am incredibly proud of what the team has achieved over that period."

By Peter Davison

Peter Davison is deputy editor of The Business Magazine. He has spent his life in journalism – doing work experience in newsrooms in and around Bristol while still at school, and landing his first job on a local newspaper aged 19. By 28 he was the youngest newspaper editor in the country.

An early advocate of online news, he spent the first years of the 2000s telling his bosses that the internet posed both the biggest opportunity and greatest threat to the newspaper industry and the art of journalism. He was right on both counts.

Since 2006 he has enjoyed a career as a freelance journalist. He lives in rural Wiltshire with one wife, two children, and three cats.