Inventing our future Collective action for a sustainable economy

Where do we want to be?
Headline regional ambitions
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2.2 Headline regional ambitions
Through extensive consultation regional targets
have been set to achieve the strategy’s vision.
These targets address the distinctive set of challenges facing the region
over the next generation and describe the leading and sustainable
economy to which the East of England aspires. Though ambitious, the
coordinated action of local, regional and national partners will ensure
the East of England improves both its economic and environmental
performance while addressing inequality. They aim at improving the
quality of life in the broadest sense.
Targets to achieving a more prosperous and sustainable economy
As a key indicator of economic well-being, improving the growth rate of
output per capita is necessarily a headline ambition for the regional
economic strategy (RES). Achieving it will require faster growth in the
productivity of those who live and work in the region and higher employment
rates. This will bring important challenges such as population and housing
growth, sectoral change and environmental and resource-use pressures.
A comprehensive programme of research was undertaken to provide
stakeholders with the information necessary to weigh up these complex
considerations.
These included:
• the RES-RSS joint-modelling project: an economic forecasting model
built specifically for the East of England that jointly models economic,
housing and population growth
• REEIO environmental and resource-use modelling: testing economic
growth scenarios and policy options for their impact on greenhouse
gas emissions, water use, energy consumption and waste arisings
• analysis of the impacts of economic growth scenarios on biodiversity,
historical heritage and other environmental receptors.
The headline regional ambitions are designed to:
• anticipate the performance of the wider UK and world economies
• be consistent with the scale and distribution of future physical
development as laid out in the regional spatial strategy
• minimise the environmental and resource-use impacts of
economic growth
• recognise infrastructure constraints and pressure on public services
• be consistent with other headline targets and objectives, other key
regional strategies and public service agreements
• take account of the region’s governance structures and changing
institutional landscape.