Public money for events, venues, and campaigns turns a budget line into jobs and tax. Living Lab shows what each pound or dollar returned, and what the next one will, on the same numbers.
One model of every public intervention in the visitor economy and everything around it: the events subsidised, the venues built, the campaigns funded, the routes incentivised, set against the calendar, the hotel market, and the origin markets they act on. Signal137 attributes what each intervention returned in GVA, tax, and jobs, net of what would have happened anyway. Demand137 shows what the next allocation would return before it is committed. The methodology is OECD-aligned.
What a specific public intervention returned: tax generated, jobs supported, GVA added, and retained revenue, net of displacement and against a stated counterfactual. The fiscal return per unit of public money, by intervention and by year. Which interventions earned their support and which were carried by the rest of the programme. Every line marked observed, derived, or inferred, so the audit office can follow it.
What the next allocation would return, on the same model that measured the last. Alternatives compared on one number: a subsidy, a venue, a campaign, a route incentive. The access ceiling in the region, so public money builds only the demand the routes and rooms can carry. The cost of not funding priced alongside the cost of funding. A refusal, with the reason, when the data cannot support the answer.
| Product | Your question | You get | What it changes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Demand137 | Whether to fund a subsidy, a hosting bid, or a destination programme | Public cost and modelled fiscal return in one comparable model, with a stated counterfactual | A funding position that names its own assumptions |
| Demand137 | How to choose between competing bids for the same money | Fiscal return per pound committed, on a common basis across programme types | The committee backs the bid with the strongest defensible return |
| Demand137 | What happens if we spend nothing? | The no-new-spend case as the reference the other options are measured against | The counterfactual is the first row of the table |
| Demand137 | Does the fiscal case clear the cost on its own? | Fiscal return stated separately from wider outcomes | Where it does not, the committee weighs wider value explicitly |
| Signal137 | What did the programme we funded actually return? | Tax, retained spend, and avoided cost, attributed and net of displacement | The ex-post result on the same method as the ex-ante case |
| Signal137 | How much weight should wider public outcomes carry? | Employment reach, community access, and regeneration effect reported beside the fiscal figures, not blended into them | Wider public benefit counted as the evidence supports |
| Signal137 | Is this cost-benefit analysis with a new name? | No. Each figure carries its own counterfactual | The committee weighs both figures |
| Signal137 | Can the model show an intervention was not worth funding? | Yes, and it sometimes does | The negative results are what make the positive ones credible |
| Both | Does this replace our appraisal process? | No. It produces the counterfactual, assumption set, and uncertainty range that process already requires | The evidence drops into the existing framework |
| Both | Who holds this, and where? | Model, data, and a trained team inside your jurisdiction | The capability survives the change of official or consultant |
Tax revenue, retained spend, and employment generated by the intervention, set against its cost.
Route incentives, event subsidies, marketing programmes, and infrastructure investments ranked by fiscal return per unit of public spend.
Each programme’s fiscal return stated independently. Living Lab identifies the programmes that generate more tax than they cost before any cut is made.
OECD-aligned methodology, displacement accounted for, multiplier assumptions documented. The number is stated at the standard the statistics office requires.
GVA and fiscal return per pound of public spend, on one method. The visitor economy’s return placed alongside transport, education, and health spending in terms the treasury already uses.
None of the three states what it includes, what period it covers, or whether the money stayed. A footprint figure is only useful when it carries its own definitions, and it is only defensible when it is kept separate from impact.
A major event is a rallying point for civic pride, and just as easily a rallying point for protest. The difference is usually whether residents can see what the event does for their street, in terms they recognise, before the road closures start.
During the 2026 World Cup, host-city hotel rates rose 13% on average. Miami rose 30.3%. New York fell 4.5%. The average was true and useless: it would have told all 16 cities the same thing, and been wrong for most of them.
We turn messy event and tourism data into decisions that help communities grow. Bring curiosity and rigour. We will hand you questions nobody has answered yet.
