Time to awaken the sleeping giant with a big bang

“Financial services are one of our greatest success stories,” Rachel Reeves told her 150,000 LinkedIn followers this week. “Worth billions to our economy and employing over 1.2 million people, the sector is central to our prosperity and to our position on the global economic stage.”

The lionising was deserved, giving due recognition to a sector that is of critical importance to the UK and whose ongoing success is politically and economically central to the government’s growth mission.

And to her credit, Reeves’ trumpeting of the country’s economic success goes beyond a single sector. “The UK is a global powerhouse in the creative industries, worth over £124bn to our economy and supporting 2.4m jobs,” she wrote last week. “We are ensuring the UK remains a world-leading destination for film and TV, backed by 40% business rates relief for film studios announced in February, providing long-term stability and support for the sector.”

What’s more, adds the chancellor, “By backing our creative industries to thrive, we are creating more opportunities for small businesses, working people and communities across the UK.”

Hear, hear. Nothing to disagree with there, unless of course you operate in another, perhaps less successful sector; or, perish the thought, in a sector whose GVA contribution is larger than financial services and the creative industries combined, and whose employment base is far broader.

You might be surprised to learn that that’s the scale of the built environment sector.

To defend Reeves – and the many of us who might have underestimated its scale – no one has done the maths before now.

But full credit to the NLA, GLA Economics and Polygon Strategy for doing so. It’s an important, potentially transformational, piece of work.

The full report will be released at LREF next week and so I’ll rein back on revealing too much. But the report’s opening line from NLA chief executive Nick McKeogh tells it like it is: “The built environment sector in Great Britain is an economic powerhouse hiding in plain sight.”

Imagine if Reeves and her ministerial colleagues set out to change that? In fairness, they have done so with planning and gone further than previous governments in explicitly identifying it as a driver of growth. But they can and should go further.

“Redefining it as a high-growth sector in the Industrial Strategy – rather than as merely a facilitator of growth in other key sectors – would allow built environment industries to reach their potential,” writes McKeogh. “Policy, taxation, education and skills reform are needed to change the public’s understanding of its true scale and potential to support national prosperity and individual lives.”

A big bang for the built environment – similar to that which positioned London as a global financial services capital in the 1980s – would be the upshot. Better still, it would have profound national, not London-centric, impact. And it would be achievable as the foundations are there.

Now it’s time to build on them.