It's official: I am truly the saddest of women. My entire career – some 40 years, in scary fact – has been devoted to driving growth through place-based partnerships.

Having worked in both private and public sectors, and often in the twilight zone betwixt the two, I was involved in this stuff way before Michael Heseltine invented City Challenge (still the most nimble of all the models) in the mid 1990s; through Single Regeneration Budget (SRB) one to six, New Deal for Communities (NDC), Housing Market Renewal (HMR), and far too many other TLAs (triple letter acronyms) to mention here. I even went into central government in the middle of the last decade to participate in the positive experience of the Greg Clark/Lord Heseltine era of the £12bn Local Growth Fund of 2014, when so much quiet progress was made, under the aegis of Greg Clark's 2011 Decentralisation and Localism Bill.