Tim Fanning

Meet Tim, from our Urban Solutions team: An entrepreneur with a head for assessing economic impact

Our colleagues at Hatch are entrepreneurs with technical souls.

What does that mean? It means we embrace the toughest challenges, spot connections and look for opportunities to share practical solutions. We think globally and act locally.

This month, we’d love to introduce you to Tim Fanning. As we explore the challenges around improving connectivity in place through the effective delivery of physical, digital and social infrastructure, Tim explains the breadth and importance of economic impact, its inherent synergy with assessing social impact, and why it’s important not to forget the human story that the numbers reveal.

Tell us about yourself and the kind of work you focus on.

I’m a director in our Manchester office and have clocked up over 20 years of consultancy experience. I work closely with colleagues in Manchester, London and other offices around the world.

While I work across all of our service lines, I’ve developed a particular specialism in economic impact assessment and business case development. I’ve been known to get involved in evaluation too.

Why do clients want to know their economic impact?

It’s a good question, without a single answer.

Sometimes there’s a concrete, immediate need. A client may be bidding for a government funding stream towards a major project—like a new innovation centre —where demonstrating economic impact is an important criterion. As an example, we recently assembled a team from our Manchester and New York offices to work with a group of cultural venues in Toronto, to help them communicate their economic and social value to the city. Working with our collaborators, TFCC, we analysed various metrics including the employment that the venues support and spent a week in Toronto speaking to the senior team and city stakeholders. This gave the client useful evidence for their stakeholder comms, as well as for their bids for securing funding for a major project.

Sometimes a socio-economic impact assessment may be required for a planning application. Or a client may want to influence government policy, especially if they think that a particular policy is going to be harmful. Having up-to-date independently verified economic evidence is useful there.

More generally, a lot of this is about understanding and increasing the visibility of clients’ wider economic contributions, beyond the narrow measures in their financial accounts and annual reports.

Why might that be important?

It may be a useful PR and Public Affairs activity. It can also be driven by the demands of legislation and investors. Organisations and sectors in receipt of government subsidy need to show the economic value they are bringing in return for funding.

ESG reporting has been growing fast. And in the UK, the Social Value Act is driving the need for good data and strategy around wider societal impact. Economic impact is one important aspect of this.

But above all, interpreting the numbers is just the first step in understanding the human story behind the numbers. “Jobs created” is abstract, but financial stability for residents of a low socio-economic neighbourhood is life changing. That’s what really matters.

Who can this assessment work particularly help?

Most of what I have mentioned relates to our clients outside government, but governments (central and local) also need supporting evidence to inform policy decisions.

For example, if a new economic sector develops in their region, decision makers need to understand what economic benefits and costs this might have. What implications does it bring for social infrastructure? What are the skills needs? We often get involved in providing evidence to help answer these kinds of questions. In a recent example of this, a team of us from Manchester and London worked with colleagues in Canada to work out what impact the development of a major green hydrogen project might have on Nova Scotia, working for public sector partners there.

Tell us about some other examples of the projects you do in this space...

There is lots of diverse stuff!

A few weeks ago, we launched our work with Transport for London, who have been making their case for a multi-year funding deal from the UK government. Here we focused specifically on the economic value of its £6 billion supply chain across the UK, mapping impacts all the way down to a constituency area level.

In the same week, we launched our report for the Textile Services Association, the trade body for a sector you’ve probably never heard of but that underpins several key UK sectors like the hospitality and healthcare industries. The keynote speaker at the event after me was Harry Redknapp!

We’ve done lots of work for universities, working with something like a third of the sector in the UK. These institutions use our evidence to demonstrate their roles as anchor institutions, delivering on regional and national priorities for skills, innovation and so on.

What is distinctive about Hatch’s approach?

Quite a lot.

Firstly, we work across so many sectors and places making us highly versatile and adaptable. Throw us into a scenario and, however unusual, we’ll get our heads around it quickly and adapt our toolkit, working with sector specialists if we need to.

Secondly, there are real synergies with the social impact advisory work that we do, as well as the work of our environment team. It is often the case that “impact” has several dimensions, including social, environmental and cultural. A good example is a major cultural regeneration project in continental Europe, which asked us to write an impact report for their stakeholders. We have linked our thinking on this to the “six capitals”, which means a triple bottom line approach, taking in everything from visitor economy effects, through to community engagement and water consumption. We can bring that integrated approach where needed.

Thirdly, we understand the importance of putting impacts into their wider strategic context. Beyond the robust modelling of impacts, we grapple with—and then communicate—what these numbers mean for people. Really, we communicate in compelling ways to help clients tell their story.

Fourthly, we use innovative analytical approaches, especially using AI and web scraping tools to map sectors, going beyond industry standard SIC codes. Working with specialists, we have used those recently in our work on the night-time economy in Central London, and on the creative industries on London’s South Bank.

What difference does Hatch’s culture and global outlook make to this process?

It’s significant. Everyone in the team is trained to think like an entrepreneur, proactively looking at opportunities to solve clients’ problems and collaborating with people from across the company globally. This helps us work seamlessly in any particular geography, from a UK base. Our UK team has delivered impact projects recently in Canada, Australia, the Middle East and even the Falkland Islands!

This outlook also means we keep the right perspective, telling the human stories behind economic trends.

What makes you an entrepreneur with a technical soul?

The entrepreneurial part is about spotting and developing opportunities for our team and for our clients. It’s about aligning our strong technical abilities with the needs of our clients, helping them anticipate and solve problems. I enjoy connecting the dots between economic trends to paint a clear picture about whether initiatives and projects are having the intended impacts on people.