Thanks for your interest Andrew. We met for 90 minutes or so and, among other things, we discussed: - whether or not public R&D spending matches up with private R&D spending regionally, and the impact it has on growth. There was a bit of disagreement here on the evidence so I'm going to dig into it with officials and some of the participants - the impact of poor connectivity in and between cities across the north of England in limiting the effective size of labour markets and dragging on regional and national GDP growth - the reasons why productivity in England's large cities outside London tends to be lower than the national average and lower than comparable cities overseas - of course, we discussed the UKs high energy costs and reforms to grid connections and other policies that could help businesses - there was a big discussion led by businesses on the role of local and regional clusters of economic activity and how they can be supported by government, and the benefits that successful ones can bring - particularly to places that aren't big cities or there suburbs Attendees were from academia and politics, City and Mayoral leadership, and then from a range of businesses - car manufacturing, health tech, banking, creative sector and more.