The UK Innovation Corridor has appointed Peter Hogg as its new Chair, succeeding Jackie Sadek, who steps down at the end of her three-year term in October.
Hogg is Country Director for the United Kingdom and Ireland at Arcadis, the global design and consultancy firm, and has spent almost three decades delivering some of London’s most significant infrastructure programmes, including the Jubilee Line Extension, St Pancras International and Heathrow Terminal 5. A Fellow of the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors, he is a non-executive board member of the Confederation of British Industry and a former non-executive director of the Thames Estuary Growth Board.
The UK Innovation Corridor is a partnership of 14 local authorities, with business and academic partners, spanning London’s Royal Docks through the Lee Valley, Hertfordshire and Essex to Cambridge, Peterborough, and Huntingdon. The Corridor generates £284.1 billion in gross value added each year and has created a quarter of England’s net new knowledge-intensive jobs since 2016, and it has adopted a target of generating £350 billion in GVA by 2040.
Peter Hogg, the new Chair of the Innovation Corridor, said:
“This is the strongest, the most vibrant and the most global investor-attractive economic geography in the country, and it is still nowhere near its ceiling. The job now is delivery: the labs, homes, power and transport that take this economy beyond £350 billion, built across the whole Corridor from the Royal Docks to up to Cambridge, Peterborough and Huntingdon. Jackie hands over a partnership with real convening power, and I will build on this.”
Jackie Sadek, the outgoing Chair of the Innovation Corridor, said:
“Chairing the UK Innovation Corridor has been a privilege. This Corridor is the closest thing the UK has to Silicon Valley, and it deserves infrastructure and investment to match. Peter understands how places grow and how investment decisions actually get made, meaning the Corridor is in very good hands moving forwards.”
John McGill, Director of the UK Innovation Corridor, said:
“Jackie leaves the Corridor stronger, better connected and harder to ignore, and the whole partnership is grateful to her. In Peter we have a Chair who spends his working life on exactly the questions we exist to answer, like how we accelerate growth, and encourage innovation wherever it is found. Our target is to see our Corridor contributing £350 billion in GVA annually to UK PLC by 2040, and Peter will help us achieve that.”
