The Lancashire Growth Plan promises a “data observatory”: the evidence base that would tell you whether the plan is actually working. On Friday afternoon, at the combined authority’s Overview and Scrutiny Committee, a senior LCCA officer was commendably honest about where that promise has got to. “The data observatory, whilst there is some good activity, it’s a concept at the moment. It doesn’t exist as a standalone function within the authority… please don’t think that this is something that’s already there, is fully staffed, is fully financed. It’s not.”
That was Friday. This is Monday. The Lancashire Business Observatory is live, and you can use it right now.
What happened at the committee
The item was the Growth Plan progress update and performance framework (agenda here). I sat on the committee as a substitute, and I put the point as plainly as I could: a data observatory that is transparent to the public is a wonderful idea, but this committee asked last October for clear, measurable outcomes from the Growth Plan with member input. Nine months later we were still being offered meetings about how we might one day measure it. Ask a member of the public what the Growth Plan has done and the honest test is simple: name one specific pound of investment or one specific job it has created. Nice conferences and glossy brochures do not count.
Dr Ged Mirfin went further. Ged is the former chief data officer of the Northwest Development Agency, and the county council’s own biography describes him as a published academic who has taught at three universities and the author of high profile award-winning papers. His question to the officers building the observatory was withering: how many of you have actually come and talked to me? None. He pointed them at NOMIS, at supply-chain measurement, at the two-to-five-year-old high-growth firms where the jobs actually come from, and at what modern AI tooling can now do with public data. He and I talk about that last subject more or less every day.
To be fair to the officers, they engaged. They committed to sit down with Ged and their data lead, and the chair directed that the committee gets a proper working session on the performance framework well before the planned March return. That commitment is on the record and we will hold them to it.
But Ged and I also had a briefer, simpler conversation afterwards: why wait?
What we built
The Lancashire Business Observatory covers every one of the 104,161 companies registered across Lancashire’s fourteen districts, and shows every figure two ways: under today’s councils, and under the four new unitary authorities that take over in April 2028. Nobody else does that, official or private. It includes:
- An area comparator benchmarking all fourteen districts and the four future unitaries against England on business density, births and deaths, survival and the official ONS high-growth measure
- A growth engine identifying Lancashire’s high-growth companies from their filed accounts, ranked by the same job-creation index the OECD uses
- The Lancashire Pound, tracing £5.6 billion of council supplier spending by whether the supplier is rooted here, trades here but is owned elsewhere, or is not local at all
- A distress watch of live insolvency notices and strike-off proposals
- Company profiles for over a thousand significant Lancashire firms, and a search across the full register
- Where political donations and public money meet, for every party including my own
- Innovation money, showing which Lancashire firms actually win Innovate UK funding
- A monthly changes edition, because an observatory that never updates is a brochure
It refreshes itself every month from the primary sources: Companies House, the Gazette, the ONS, the Electoral Commission, the councils’ own published spending. Every figure carries its source and its date, every assessment links its method, and there is a corrections route if we get anything wrong. Running cost to the taxpayer: nothing.
The point
This is not about embarrassing officers, who were straight with the committee and constructive in their response. It is about pace and ambition. Lancashire has been promised an economic evidence base for over a year while the machinery works out what a dashboard is. Two Reform councillors and the public registers got a working version live in a weekend, and the LCCA is welcome to every line of it: the methodology is published, the data is public, and the offer Ged made in that committee room stands. Come and talk to us.
The observatory will keep growing regardless. The next monthly edition lands automatically in August, and from then on Lancashire will be able to see, month by month, whether its economy is moving. That was the whole idea of a data observatory. It just needed someone to build it.