The chancellor’s Budget has given local leadership teams plenty to do. Continuing pandemic management sits alongside recovery planning, town and city deal funding, establishing freeports, preparing for levelling up, community renewal bids and even civil service relocations. The day job of managing acute pressures in discretionary local services hasn’t gone away and nor have the grand societal challenges of our time.

Economic renewal in the shadow of a pandemic: a personal perspective, produced for the Institute for Economic Development’s local economic renewal workstream, suggests an agenda on which local government leaders can draw to make the most of the menus being required of them by central government, whilst also effectively positioning their cities, towns and communities for the post-COVID, post-Brexit world.