Economic Development Strategy

West Berkshire's local economy has long been strong and resilient, with a high number of businesses representing a diverse range of industries, a well-qualified workforce, and an excellent natural environment. However, like in other areas, West Berkshire has faced various challenges to local economic recovery and renewal following the COVID-19 pandemic and supply-side shocks caused by the invasion of Ukraine. We originally drafted an Economic Development Strategy in 2019, which was adopted in 2020. However, in response to the pandemic, we developed a refreshed version of the strategy in 2021, which sets out a revised set of actions.

This means there are now two documents relating to our plans to support the economy of West Berkshire:

• Economic Development Strategy Refresh (2021) [10MB] - this is our up-to-date working strategy and is accompanied by a high level Delivery Plan [5MB] which sets out short, medium, and long-term actions. 
• Economic Development Strategy (2020) [11MB] - this is the original strategy drafted in 2019 and adopted in 2020. It set out our relative position of strength and sought to ensure that more local people were able to take advantage of the opportunities our district has to offer.

The current Economic Development Strategy ran until 2023. As such, we will be working on a new strategy to run from 2024, which will take forward our key projects and outline how the council plans on facilitating development across the district over the coming years and will be aligned with the new Council Strategy.

Annual review

We have conducted two annual reviews into the progress that has been made against the actions and priorities in the Economic Development Strategy Refresh in the years since it was published in 2021. Both the 2022 and 2023 review can be read using the links below.

Economic Development Strategy Refresh - annual review 2022 [8MB]

Economic Development Strategy Annual Review 2023 [13MB]