Tuesday 19 May 2026 5:33 am
| Updated:
Monday 18 May 2026 12:32 pm
Britain can’t afford to spend the next six months navel gazing. We need to get serious about investing, says Katie PerriorLast month I woke up in Austin, Texas, pulled back the curtains in my hotel room and looked out across a skyline punctuated by cranes. Not just a handful of projects but dozens. Much to chagrin of the locals, the city seems to be permanently under construction. It was a useful reminder that growth is not a paper exercise, its tangible. Visible. You can literally feel it happening from under your feet and see it in the skies. Texas gets this. It thinks in decades – its recent opening of an FDI office in London, shows it to be aggressively going after business with lower taxes and attractive incentives, coming to our capital because they intend to bag more of it their end. It acts with the confidence of a place that expects to win.This week, I’m heading to Leeds for UKREiiF, where thousands from the property, infrastructure, regeneration and investment sectors will descend on the city and compete for a limited supply of hotel rooms while discussing the future shape of our towns and cities. It’s one of the most optimistic events in the conference calendar, from new stations to life science districts, data centres to energy infrastructure, these people are the drivers of growth. And yet there is an uncomfortable backdrop this year, and it’s a movie I’ve watched before. I know the storyline, if not the ending. Two years ago this week, I travelled to Leeds to speak at a dinner on politics. I stayed three hours before turning around and heading back to London. Rishi Sunak had called an election, and I was 200 miles away at wrong side of the country. I needed to be back in Westminster to advise clients on what came next. Labour’s overwhelming majority created a sense amongst international investors that Britain had finally found stability after the psychodrama of Brexit and Covid. Yet just 24 months later, Westminster has once again turned inward. Inconvenient distractionBritain really cannot afford to spend the next six months naval gazing while politicians sort themselves out. Investors do not stop spending because Westminster is inconveniently distracted – they just spend elsewhere instead. Capital doesn’t politely sit around waiting for us to mop up our own mess.
