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Supporting Local Economic Growth – with Gagan Mohindra MP

This webinar will explore how the government currently supports entrepreneurs to drive local economic growth and what more can be done. We will hear from Gagan Mohindra MP about his significant experience at the local level and now as a Member of Parliament for South West Hertfordshire, Mark Bretton, for an update on the work of the LEP Network, and Tom Forth on what his research suggests works to drive local economic growth.

This event will cover:

  • What is being done in the face of Covid 19 to support local economic growth;

  • What is the best way to ensure a entrepreneur-led recovery across the UK;

  • How can we better support entrepreneurs in the future.

Gagan Mohindra is the Conservative Member of Parliament for South West Hertfordshire, for which he was elected in 2019. Gagan read Mathematics at King's College London and worked in financial services, before founding the Chromex Group four years after graduating, where he worked until 2015. 

Gagan got involved in politics in his mid-twenties. He has significant experience in many of the issues our constituency is facing: in Planning, including in his most recent role as Chairman of Planning on my District Council, and Local Government Finance as the Lead Member at the County Council for Finance, Property and Housing.  In 2017, Gagan was elected onto the County Council becoming Lead Member for Finance, Housing and Property, representing 1.4 million residents and managing a gross budget of £2 billion.

Mark Bretton is Chairman of Hertfordshire LEP and the LEP Network, the national body that brings all 38 LEPs together. He is an independent consultant with 36 years of wide-ranging business experience, including in several high profile Government programmes. Until recently Mark was a Managing Director (Partner) in the leadership team of the professional services firm Accenture. He sits on the Business Leaders’ Council of the charity Teach First.

Mark has an MBA in Export Management and International Business from The City, University of London Business School and a BSc Econ (Hons) in Management Studies. He was a Royal Signals Reserve Officer (Major) and holds a Territorial Decoration. Mark joined the Hertfordshire LEP Board as Business Representative and Chair Designate in January 2016 and took over as Chair in June 2016.  He became Chair of the LEP Network in September 2019.

Tom Forth is co-founder and CTO at TheDataCity.com, Founder of imactivate, and Head of Data at ODILeeds. 

Tom started imactivate in 2013 to make real objects digitally active, developing and maintained the Phonegap plugin for Moodstocks until it was acquired by Google in 2016. He released Rusty the Squeaky Robot, an augmented-reality physical book for children with real-time translations and human voices, in 2014, proving that real product innovation could be powered by augmented reality.

Tom’s  main clients are now businesses and governments, and he has worked with the Open Data Institute Leeds since it started. He was the first associate and I'm now the Head of Data.He’s played a leading role in making Leeds one of the world's best cities for open data. 

His latest project is The Data City, a spin-out from ODILeeds, which is using huge amounts of data to better understand economic development and the potential for innovation.