The Local Environment and Economic Development (LEED) Toolkit

The Local Environment and Economic Development (LEED) Toolkit is designed to help Local Enterprise Partnerships (LEPs) and their partners with economic development. There were 39 LEPs across England, which involved local authorities and businesses that prioritise areas of infrastructural investment. As of April 2024, central government support for LEPs was withdrawn and their functions transferred to local and combined authorities.

The Toolkit offers a simple, technically robust and systematic way of assessing environmental information in relation to economic planning. Through a series of three ‘levels’, LEED supports workshops, key experts, and data collection and analysis, focusing on ecosystem services. Within these, the Toolkit considers four elements, economic planning, physical economy, relationship with the environment, and outputs. Ultimately this produces accessible, non-technical outputs that assist strategic economic decision making.

The Toolkit aims to support LEPs make operational sense of complex environmental information. This aims to enable informed decision making concerning the opportunities for both growth and costs from the natural environment. The Toolkit will also be of interest to enterprise and economic development initiatives elsewhere in the UK.

The Defra network (Environment Agency, Natural England and Forestry Commission) were responsible for producing the Toolkit. LEPs, local authorities and Local Nature Partnerships in England supported its development.