The East Midlands Inclusive Growth Commission is an independent, year-long project. It will define a bold, long-term economic plan for the region.
Following the interim report published in March 2025, the Commission’s final report will advise the new East Midlands Combined County Authority on how to open up more economic opportunities so people and places can thrive.
One of the key ideas at the heart of the Commission’s thinking is that of ‘opportunity escalators’. We’re sharing the concept now to give stakeholders time and space to provide their feedback before we publish our final recommendations.
Interim report
This calls for a change in regional investment argues for more powers, funding and flexibility like those seen in other places.
Inclusive growth means making sure more people have a chance to succeed. When we published our interim findings in March, we introduced the idea of an opportunity escalator. It is a clear, simple pathway to help people get into decent jobs and progress to better pay and conditions.
The basic idea is this:
People should be able to get on the escalator by overcoming obstacles that stop them from entering the workforce.
And people get up the escalator by taking manageable steps to build on their skills and experience, no matter where they are starting from.
But right now, too many people face barriers on both fronts. People struggle to get on the escalator because of issues like health problems, a lack of transport, caring responsibilities, or unaffordable housing.
They also find it difficult to get up the escalator, because education and training can be complicated, expensive and too rigid for their needs, or because they don’t know what other jobs they would be able to do with their existing skills.
For inclusive growth, we need to fix both problems.
Since we published our interim findings, we have been developing practical ways to remove these barriers and help people move up the escalator.
Behind the simple concept of an escalator sits a powerful new toolkit designed to help the Combined Authority, education providers and employers be smarter and more targeted in the way they support people to find routes to better pay and conditions
Let’s start with the problem that our toolkit tries to solve: For too long, governments and businesses have thought about the world of work as split into ‘sectors’ – like manufacturing, retail and healthcare. Too often, the economic plans that business and government put together are focused on how to attract certain “superstar” sectors to an area because they are ‘high value’ or technologically advanced. This is the ‘top-down’ approach to creating economic growth.
There is nothing wrong with trying to attract high-tech businesses to the East Midlands, but this won’t be enough to help local workers access better jobs, especially if those jobs require years of study and qualifications.
We’ve built an approach based on the latest data that starts with identifying what skills people living in an area already have. The toolkit then shows what better-paid roles people could realistically move into further up the escalator, and what small steps they’d need to take to get there.
For example, someone with mechanical skills won’t become a nuclear physicist overnight, but they might be able to find good quality, well-paid work helping to build and maintain a new nuclear facility, using the knowledge they already have, and building on it.
Our toolkit can show which types of jobs will help to carry more people up the escalator, and how to ensure more people can access those jobs with better transport.
The goal is to give people a clear, realistic way to improve their pay and conditions, so they can make that choice for themselves.
We use cutting-edge data that connects the jobs people do now to the skills they already have. We then pick out the jobs that would use similar skills, and which would help to raise people’s pay levels. And we make this practical by looking at local transport routes – roads, buses, trains – to understand where people can get to for work.
Using this data and a live feed of job ads in the region, we have created a practical tool that can show what jobs someone could move into at any point in time.
This tool can be used in four main ways:
Authorities can use the tool to:
Teachers, lecturers and other educators can use this data to shape the courses they offer to support people into better work, and meet demand from employers.
Industry can use this to understand who to recruit, where to locate new sites, and what skills to invest in.
Individuals can use the tool to understand what job opportunities might be open to them. It will also help them easily build on their current skills to find a route to better pay and conditions.
Between now and the publication of our final report in September, we will use this toolkit to understand how the East Midlands can provide better work opportunities.
That means looking at different towns, cities and industrial sites in the East Midlands and understanding how they can attract easy-to-reach job opportunities. Sometimes that will mean better public transport or more affordable housing, for example.
The East Midlands has some big opportunities. The region is:
This development will need construction workers, electricians, engineers, drivers, planners and managers.
We are also going to look at some of the major sources of current jobs in the area – retail, healthcare and education – and make recommendations on how to improve the career paths. Following these will empower workers to move on and up into better-paying work.
Our toolkit can show us what types of jobs individuals following different vocations could aim for. Looking beyond their sector, it will help build skills and pay, and demonstrate how businesses and government can invest in those workers. No job should be a ‘dead-end’ job if there is a working opportunity escalator in place.
At the end of our Commission, we won’t just publish a growth plan. We’ll leave behind a practical, people-focused toolkit that anyone in the East Midlands can use in the years ahead.
We look forward to unveiling both the report and the toolkit in full in September.
Unlocking prosperity
Learn about our work as we recommend an ambitious, evidence-based plan to unleash potential and deliver prosperity for communities in the East Midlands.
