By Nathan Spencer, Director at UKREiiF

It’s sometimes difficult to remember that UKREiiF has only taken place twice. It’s become the must-attend event in the industry calendar, and there’s a real sense of FOMO for those who’ve yet to attend.

But we’re not resting on our laurels; having only run the event twice means there’s lots of learnings, lots of expansion, and lots of opportunity. Since May, we’ve gathered a lot of feedback from many different people, organisations, and associations, and alongside our Advisory Group and internal colleagues, we’ve been looking at how we implement further enhancements to UKREiiF.

Here’s a bit of an overview of some of those changes…

Expansion and Growth

In 2023, more than 7,500 official attendees came through the gates, and in 2024, we expect that number to be between 10,000 and 12,000 attendees. We’ve therefore had to expand the site, which we’ve managed to do successfully with the ongoing support of the Royal Armouries and land owners like Allied London and Leeds City Council. Growth areas include: Areas in green below highlight some of the new growth areas on site, which include:

  • Almost 20 new pavilions across the site, allowing companies to have their designated space for three days.
  • Expansion of the secure zone to include the ‘Boulevard’—moving the likes of Pizza Express, Department, Fearns, North Star Coffee, and other venues into the official event space for badge holders only.
  • Three extra dockside pavilions across the northern bridge, creating a more vibrant entrance area.
  • Closure of the road close to the Royal Armouries car park and Holiday Inn, creating more room for pavilions and additional food and beverage options.
  • Policy Pavilion: bringing more voices from national government together to discuss, challenge, and unlock opportunities within policy
  • Use of the waterfront for further pop-up food and beverage points, including a new Food and Drink Avenue.
A site map of the new expansion areas, highlighted in green at UKREiiF

Fresh and versatile content

Thought leadership is of course on show at UKREiiF, with panel discussions delving into key topics with senior leaders and figures across the industry. But we’re looking to freshen up our content even more with the introduction of many new types of content across the event. Some of these include:

  • Interactive ‘Question Time’ style panels
  • Hackathons: putting people of different seniorities and at different career stages together to answer some of the industry’s toughest challenges
  • Interactive workshops that enable a target audience to achieve real outputs and actions to enhance development and regeneration across the UK
  • More targeted networking events focused on industries and sectors, such as infrastructure, housing, ports, commercial real estate, and more
  • More early-career professionals voices will be heard on our panels as we enhance our diversity charter for on-stage diversity.

UKREiiF School Engagement Programme

A key differentiator between UKREiiF and competitor events is our focus and dedication to social value—generating £2.3 million of social impact in 2023 and securing £750,000 of charitable donations and in-kind benefits to organisations.

In 2024, to ensure UKREiiF continues to become much more than a 3-day event, we’re working to develop a programme of pre-UKREiiF activities that reaches thousands of high school and college students to promote the opportunities within the industry. We’ll be revealing more details in due course, but we’re excited to look at how we can start utilising UKREiiF to reach students to showcase what our industry does and inspire a future generation to be attracted to the industry.

In addition, we’re going to be doing a number of pre-UKREiiF engagement programmes with early career professionals too, giving tips on how to network and get the most out of UKREiiF, in addition to events around how to approach UKREiiF as a first-timer and speaker training sessions for those who’d like to improve their skillset ahead of the event.

Local Economic Impact

We’re looking at ways to further build on the local economic impact that UKREiiF has on the city region, having helped generate over £12 million for the local economy in 2024.

One new facet at UKREiiF is the addition of several on-site local independent business owners with pop-up stands to promote their businesses and sell products. We’re currently working on the list of businesses that’ll be present. We’re also doing outreach to speak to organisations on how to maximise UKREiiF, whether that be speaking to the Hotel and Hospitality Association, which we did in October to share details on how to maximise UKREiiF, or doing in-person drop-ins to restaurants, bars, and venues to talk about the fringe we expect at UKREiiF and how they can maximise the opportunities. Information can also be found by clicking here, which shows some of the hospitality spaces you can book.

There are many more things in the pipeline and many more already happening that we’ve not managed to touch on above.

If you’ve got any questions, drop me a line at [email protected].

By Nathan Spencer, Director at UKREiiF