The Midlands Engine has returned from another successful year in the Leeds sunshine at UKREiiF. The marquees may get packed down and the blue rectangle logo retired, but it is clear that the legacy of our inward investment work will live on.
It was the fourth – and final – time the Midlands Engine has had a presence at the UK’s largest property investment conference. While the region’s pan-regional partnership may not be returning to Leeds, this blog dives into the insights, reflects on the key messages and demonstrates how the Midlands Engine’s ambition to drive economic growth through new investment vehicles, a major university R&D campaign and place-based impact investing can be taken up by partner organisations and continued.
The Midlands Investment Portfolio – updated for UKREiiF 2025 – is now worth over £50bn with the potential to create over 400,000 jobs.
It’s combined total can deliver over 60,000 new homes, 25 million ft^2 of commercial space and spans 8000 hectares (that’s the size of Coventry).
The Portfolio update features 15 new developments including Chatterley Park, Explore Park and the West Midlands Interchange.
The sessions in the pavilion brought the portfolio to life with announcements made on stage from the partners themselves: Keele University’s new innovation district and the launch of Invest Staffordshire to name a few.
Listing all of the Midlands’ major investment propositions in one place for the ease of an investor who may be unused to the Midlands investment landscape – and it’s ever evolving make up of new mayoral authorities – demonstrates it’s continued value.
Therefore, the Portfolio will continue to be updated after the Midlands Engine ceases operations in summer 2025.
Birmingham Health Innovation Campus – a major capital investment opportunity
The Portfolio will also continue to host the Invest in UK R&D campaign – launched at UKREiiF 2024 and supported by the Midlands Engine throughout, especially to deliver the showpiece ‘UK Universities Drive Growth’ pavilion for this year’s event.
This pavilion featured a variety of panel sessions, roundtables and investment receptions, and featured academic voices from the likes of Dr Helen Turner, Director of Midlands Innovation, and Karen Holdford, Vice Chancellor of Cranfield University, in conversation with ministers including Jim McMahon MP, Chi Onwurah MP and former Minister George Freeman MP.
George Freeman MP, Chi Onwurah MP, Lord Harrington, Dr Helen Turner and campaign director, Alex Favier
The panels agreed that the UK has a compelling proposition and is well-positioned for international investment but there is a need for greater strategic national collaboration to fully showcase the depth of cluster expertise. This aligns directly with the central message ‘UK Universities Drive Growth’—uniting the power and potential of UK research as a key driver of growth and prosperity for our regions and the nation.
Strengthening this approach could be instrumental in securing larger-scale investment from overseas. There is already many new missions being planned – bringing leaders from the region’s universities together as a collective to London Tech Week, Paris Airshow and SxSW London in June alone. These missions have already generated over 1000 investor enquiry leads. To see the full programme of missions and learn more about the campaign, click here.
Back on the ground of the Royal Armouries itself, what was the mood in the pavilion between our partners from across the region?
Sunnier for a start – and not just the weather.
Last year a common theme at the UK’s largest real-estate and property conference was the need for housing and specifically the complex planning system acting as a barrier to development.
Nearly a year into the new Labour government, the hot topic was the Planning and Infrastructure Bill currently going through Parliament. The government have made no secret of pushing serious reform in this area with proposals, considering 100 sites for New Towns. What’s more, affordable, social or single-occupancy housing will be a large growth market for the coming decade providing investment opportunities across different sites.
Speaking of new towns, we were updated on the progress the £80 million Station Quarter in Telford – the first of its kind site for the town which has seen private development delivering homes in the town centre for the first time.
The Telford Panel from L – R: James Dunn Investment Director at Telford & Wreakin Council, Samuel Clark CEO of Mercia Real Estate and Stuart Penn of Lovell Partnerships. Photo: Amy Bould
This was a clear theme which emerged in each panel session – how crucial it is to have good quality housing located where the good quality jobs are to ensure clusters can thrive. Clusters, like for example, defence manufacturing in Telford which used the pavilion to announce Rheinmetall are locating to the borough, an investment worth £400m. Or space technologies in Space City Leicester – located in a dense urban area which has seen significant house building, giving people the opportunity to live close to their place of work.
Of course, house building comes with its challenges and constraints. But this was a topic confronted by the Invest in Nottingham panel session. The ‘Beyond the Blueprint’ panel made no bones about the fact that the city has challenging sites. Natalie Robinson from E-ON addressed how Queen’s Medical Centre – one of the largest hospitals in the country – is showing its age but is being retrofitted with miles of double glazing to keep that all important heat in during the winter months and its patients more comfortable.
The Nottingham panel from L-R: Vicky Evans, Natalie Robinson, Amy Harhoff, Sajeeda Rose and Megan Powell Vreewsijk
Then there is of course The Broadmarsh site in the heart of the city – a major regeneration opportunity which features in the Midlands Investment Portfolio. Sajeeda Rose – Chief Executive of Nottingham City Council – spoke to the site’s complexity (with a retail giant Intu going bust in the middle of a pandemic) but explained how – with the recent announcement that Homes England has purchased the site – the construction of 1000 homes and 20,000 square metres of retail, office and community space can be realised in the coming years. These challenges, then, are being overcome.
That collaboration between partnering organisations and the private and public sector is clearly the key. This was explored by Invest Warwickshire ‘Partnership is Development’ session where the relationships, knowledge and contact sharing was directly feeding into better placemaking. Warwickshire’s other session in the Pavilion – focusing on how developers can build sustainably – discussed how new thinking around the circular economy and extracting value from waste is happening – from converting empty offices to hotels, to using rain water to make green hydrogen.
Invest in Warwickshire’s session Photo: Ian Flynn
Of course, much of this house building and place making requires a skilled workforce. And to have those skills grown from within local communities was also a key theme explored by Staffordshire’s session. The County Council has overseen significant investment in its further education facilities and colleges, the University of Keele is expanding its training programmes and employers like Seddon are welcoming greater numbers of apprenticeships each year. It’s a massive factor behind the productivity growth which the county is experiencing.
Our universities, ease of doing business and an innovation-friendly regulatory environment are major draws for inward investment.
Keele University – kicking off the pavilion programme – launched the Keele Innovation District where we heard from Vice-Chancellor Trevor McMillan OBE who presented the university’s vision and masterplan. The District will drive UK productivity by stimulating high-growth sectors, building on a strong talent pool working in digital technologies, advanced materials, life sciences and clean energy industries. University campuses aren’t just fostering SMEs – they’re also attracting major companies like Michelin who moved to Keele’s Science Park earlier this spring.
Innovation was also the key theme for Invest in Leicester‘s panel session with its focus on local Enterprise Zones and how Charnwood Campus – based just outside Loughborough – is at the forefront of pharmaceutical innovation and offers a major capital investment within a major life science cluster. Another example was Space Park Leicester – benefitting from low taxes and links with the University of Leicester, attracting global space partners to the UK and representing a major asset in the region’s space cluster.
Invest in Leicester’s session Photo: Oliver Whittaker
The Midlands Engine’s recent roundtable discussions and subsequent in-depth reports into the major clusters of the region were also given a platform at UKREiiF thanks to the Boardroom pavilion.
The space allowed for partners to talk privately through the findings of other major reports including the Good Economy Report – ‘Place-based Prosperity’ – commissioned by the Midlands Engine. The report, published in March, provides insights and recommendations to attract large-scale, long-term private investment into the Midlands, building on successful examples of place-based impact investing (PBII) like that seen from the Greater Manchester Pension Fund.
Recognising moves within government to encourage more ‘local’ investment across Local Government Pension Funds, this paper responds by guiding local and regional stakeholders how to optimise the viability of their propositions across 7 asset classes (housing, regeneration, infrastructure, SME finance, health, clean energy, and natural capital). Supporting this, the work also presents a series of ready-to-go investment propositions of sufficient scale and class for institutional investors, to enable early demonstrations of the opportunity within the region.
The report provides a roadmap informed by more than a dozen pension and insurance fund leaders themselves and best practice elsewhere, and the ideas should be adopted by combined and local authorities to build relationships with their respective pension funds to unlock capital for local investment.
A small VIP event to catalyse some of this activity will take place in early summer.
In 2024 Claire Ward was just days into her role as the East Midlands mayor. For 2025 combined authority mayors were everywhere you looked.
The newly elected Luke Campbell of Hull and East Yorkshire and Greater Lincolnshire’s Dame Andrea Jenkyns were welcomed to the Midlands Engine Pavilion by the Humber Freeport CEO Simon Green. The session, also featuring Amy Lambert, Head of Freeports and Investment Zones for the Department of Business and Trade, focused on how cross-regional collaboration and unified leadership across the Humber region will be key to present a compelling and consistent message to investors.
In May 2023 the Midlands Engine published Exploring the Investment Potential of Midlands Clusters, working with the CBI, Data City, Beauhurst, and Wavteq to quantify (in a UK context) key industry specialisations and sites across the region. This was followed by the publication of 23 cluster ‘snapshots’ and 5 further ‘critical technology’ snapshots.
Since then, industry ‘deep dives’ were held with key industry partners to find the real ‘Midlands story’ for each of these sectors, including specific growth opportunities and associated strategic asks of national and local government to help realise them.
Before the Midlands Engine funding was cut, 4 of these deep dives took place resulting in comprehensive reports on the opportunities (and challenges along the way), involving more than 250 businesses, universities, trade associations, local government and other stakeholders:
A further industry deep dive Enhancing Economic Growth Through Defence – The Role of the Midlands’ Manufacturing and Innovation Ecosystem was held in collaboration with the Manufacturing Technology Centre and Army leadership in May 2025 and will produce a roadmap for defence industry growth in the region, although this will not be published in full and for some time. The Manufacturing Technology Centre will take this forwards.
And it’s that theme – across a decade of partnership and a vast geography of different counties – that remains the same since Midlands Engine’s inception: wherever you look across the Midlands – from schools talking to employers about how to address skills gaps, house builders and local authorities building new homes, or universities speaking to investors, working together in collaboration is the only way this fantastic region can realise its full potential.
Continuing programme of work
Jun 17 2025
With government funding coming to an end in March 2025, the Midlands Engine has now ceased operations. But the influence of our work together – across local government, business, academia and communities right across the Midlands – will be felt long into the future.
Read more Continuing programme of work
May 23 2025
Economic Opportunities
May 9 2025
Today, (Friday 9 May 2025) a coalition of 15 Midlands universities launch a bold new initiative that is set to revolutionise how research and innovation are translated into real-world impact across the region.
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