Growth, grit and green capital: the agenda facing Britain in 2026
As delegates gather in Westminster, the forum’s organisers set out the three debates that will define this year’s summit — and the decade beyond it.
When the first delegates take their seats beneath the vaulted ceiling of the Queen Elizabeth II Centre this March, they will do so against a backdrop that is cautiously optimistic. Inflation has eased back towards the Bank of England’s target, the labour market remains resilient, and business investment has edged upwards for a fourth consecutive quarter. Yet beneath the headline figures lie the structural questions that have defined British economic debate for a generation: how to lift productivity, how to spread prosperity beyond the South East, and how to finance the transition to a cleaner economy without choking off growth.
This year’s programme has been built deliberately around those tensions. Rather than a procession of set-piece speeches, the organisers have weighted the agenda towards working sessions — round-tables, data briefings and cross-party panels — where disagreement is treated as a feature, not a failure. “The British economy will not be fixed by consensus alone,” says one member of the advisory board. “It will be shaped by honest argument about trade-offs.”
Productivity: the puzzle that will not go away
No subject returns to the forum as reliably as productivity. For the better part of two decades, output per hour worked in the United Kingdom has grown more slowly than in comparable economies, and closing that gap remains the single most important lever for raising living standards. This year’s sessions will examine the uneven adoption of automation among small and medium-sized enterprises, the long shadow of under-investment in skills, and the role that planning reform could play in unlocking new infrastructure.
Delegates from the Midlands and the North will press a familiar case: that national productivity averages obscure a widening regional divide. The “levelling up” agenda may have changed its name across successive governments, but the underlying challenge — giving towns outside the capital a genuine stake in national growth — endures.
“Britain does not lack ideas or ambition. It lacks the patient capital and the long-term policy that let good ideas scale.”
Green capital and the net-zero transition
If productivity is the forum’s perennial theme, the financing of net zero is its fastest growing one. The City of London has positioned itself as a global hub for green finance, and the summit will host a dedicated stream on how private capital can be mobilised for offshore wind, grid modernisation and carbon-capture projects. The central question is no longer whether the transition is necessary, but how its costs and benefits are shared — between taxpayer and investor, between present and future.
Trade and the competitiveness question
A third thread runs through the whole programme: Britain’s place in a fragmenting global trading system. With new agreements signed and others under negotiation, speakers will assess whether the United Kingdom is making the most of its regulatory freedom, and how exporters — from Scotch whisky distillers to fintech scale-ups — can compete in markets that are at once more open and more contested than ever.
Taken together, the three strands form a single argument the forum has made for nearly thirty years: that a serious economy requires serious conversation. The figures below set the scene for the debates to come.