Development of the Oxfordshire Investment and Delivery Plan

Following the publication of The Oxfordshire Local Industrial Strategy , Oxfordshire LEP (OxLEP) commissioned Steer Economic Development to transform a set of outline projects into a coherent and visionary Investment Plan which position the county as one of the top-three global innovation ecosystems, and to produce the content for outreach to a range of external audiences in both the public and private sectors.

The Investment Plan was built around five ‘foundations’ – Ideas, Infrastructure, Business Environment, Places, and People. In each of these domains, the projects proposed by partners were at varying stages of development, ranging from concepts through to Outline Business Cases. As a key part of our work, we were therefore required to progress and develop a mixed basket of initiatives through to a common and unified level of development.

The Investment Plan which was publicly available in September 2020, is comprising a portfolio of 20 ready for delivery projects, together with a further 19 projects in development which all together translates the ideas and aspiration of the Local Industrial Strategy into a coherent programme of delivery over an initial 10 year period to 2030, worth c£4.3billion.

Steer Economic Development’s team worked across the five ‘foundations’ with local partners to ensure their project bids were developed progressively to levels of logic, detail, and operational specification capable of withstanding funder appraisal and assessment. Working across the 39 proposals, over six months, we providing projects sponsors with an extensive programme of face-to-face and telephone coaching support, this structured to ensure that each project had a clear and defined logic model from which a fundable business case could be built. Each of these logic models was aligned with Green Book guidance, this recognising that most funders would be in central government.