Josh Stott

Josh leads our economic development offer through our specialist division, Steer Economic Development.  He brings over 20 years’ experience advising public, private, and third sectors on all aspects of economic development. He is passionate about the role economic development can play in catalysing innovation and growth, driving up living standards, placemaking, and achieving net zero ambitions. He takes great pride in enabling our clients to achieve greater impact, to be more evidenced based and ambitious.

Based in Leeds, Josh bridges across economic development, transport and property, enabling our clients to be more integrated and impactful in their thinking and approach. He advises central and local public sector clients across strategy, case making, and evaluation work on wide ranging policy areas spanning regeneration and housing, innovation and enterprise, net zero, and inclusive growth. 

Josh leads much of our placed-based strategy work and is highly skilled at baselining, marshalling evidence, partnership working, stakeholder facilitation and consensus building.  This has included developing a new Economic Strategy on behalf of the recently formed unitary, North Yorkshire County Council, providing the framework for a more ambitious and carbon neutral approach to local economic growth.

Josh is well versed in the ‘art’ of case making and the technical HMT Green Book requirements for assessing economic impacts and Value for Money. He helps our clients to maximise the potential impacts of interventions through shaping project development and adopting a creative approach to assessing ‘routes to impact’ and quantifying benefits, alongside capturing less readily measurable benefits through Strategic Added Value.  Josh bridges across economic development, transport and property, enabling our clients to be more integrated and impactful in their thinking and approach. He has a particular focus on strategic infrastructure and area-based capital investment, previously leading our Housing Infrastructure Fund (HIF) lead consultant role, providing technical housing and transport economics advise to Homes England and MHCLG across c. 50 (£6bn) local authority strategic infrastructure bids. 

Josh is also a highly experienced evaluation director helping our clients to understand ‘What Works?’ through robust processes and impact evaluation of public policy. He always adopts a constructive and forward-looking approach, with a view to identifying what lessons can be learned to improve future policy design and delivery. Josh brings extensive experience in applying HMT Magenta Book Principles to our mixed-method evaluations, deploying theory-based and quasi-experimental approaches, across diverse economic development programmes. Much of Josh’s evaluation work has a national focus, advising clients such as: BEIS, UKRI, DLUCH, Homes England, DfT, and DCMS. This includes our evaluation of the £9bn Local Growth Fund (LGF) on behalf of DLUCH, our evaluation of the Smal Business Research initiative on behalf of UKRI and our evaluation of the Home Builders Fund on behalf of Homes England.  

Josh began his career in commercial property investment before moving over into economic development consultancy.  Josh joined us from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation where, as Head of Policy and Research, he led a team of local government, net zero, and housing specialists and designed JRF’s ground-breaking ‘Cities and Inclusive Growth’ programme.