The government plans to give English regions greater influence over investment, skills, infrastructure, and industrial development as Prime Minister Andy Burnham expands the role of devolution in the UK’s growth strategy.
Burnham told the House of Commons that local industrial strategies would be revived, with areas encouraged to identify priority sectors and coordinate business, universities, and government around regional economic plans.
The policy forms part of a wider redistribution of economic powers from Whitehall, with the government offering devolution arrangements to areas of England that do not currently have them.
Number 10 North, established by the new administration, is intended to operate as a central route through which regions can seek decisions from departments and negotiate the transfer of powers and resources.
The Prime Minister said it would work closely with the Treasury and provide a single point of contact for regions seeking more coordinated decisions from central government.
Further devolution powers are expected to include post-16 technical education, employment support, and elements of fiscal policy, with an overnight visitor levy due to become available towards the end of the 2027-28 financial year.
Industrial policy will form another part of the model. Burnham said the government would support areas to take greater public control over investment strategy, drawing on Greater Manchester’s approach to combining local resources, borrowing, and fragmented central-government budgets.
Local industrial strategies will identify priority sectors and bring businesses, academia, and government together around development plans.
The proposals revive an approach used under Theresa May’s government but place it within a substantially broader devolution programme.
Energy infrastructure is one of the constraints the government says it wants to address. Burnham told MPs that companies were waiting too long for electricity-grid connections and could face prohibitive costs when seeking to accelerate them.
Grid access has become an increasingly important investment consideration as manufacturers, data centres, renewable-energy developers, logistics businesses, and other power-intensive operations seek new connections.
A project can have finance, customers, land, and planning approval yet still face a lengthy delay if sufficient network capacity is unavailable. That makes the electricity system part of the country’s industrial investment environment rather than solely an energy-policy issue.
The regional skills agenda is similarly linked to economic development. Mayors are expected to gain greater scope to shape technical education and employment support around the needs of their local economies.
The objective is to create a closer relationship between vocational pathways, work placements, colleges, and sectors where employers are seeking workers.
Regional industrial strategies could make that planning more specific by identifying industries in which a place already has a concentration of businesses, research, infrastructure, or specialist skills.
Economic clusters can benefit from common supply chains, pools of experienced workers, universities, customers, and investors. The risk is that sector strategies become administrative exercises where local commercial capability is weak.
The quality of implementation will therefore depend on how regions choose priorities and how much financial and decision-making authority accompanies the new plans.
Funding structure is another part of the proposal. Local authorities and combined authorities have frequently had to bid for separate central-government programmes, each with different conditions and spending periods.
Combining resources into broader regional investment funds can create more flexibility and support longer planning horizons, although it also transfers greater responsibility for investment selection and governance to local bodies.
Borrowing will increase that responsibility further. Regions using loans alongside public grants and their own resources must ensure projects can support the resulting obligations and that risk is clearly allocated.
The Prime Minister also linked regional development to the retention of British startups and scaleups, saying the government wanted more companies to remain in the UK as they expand.
That issue extends beyond early-stage finance. Science and technology companies can require later-stage capital, specialist staff, suitable property, energy connections, research facilities, customers, and procurement opportunities before they can grow domestically at international scale.
The government’s approach therefore brings devolution, infrastructure, skills, finance, and industrial policy into the same framework.
There are substantial details still to be settled. Individual powers, funding settlements, accountability arrangements, borrowing rules, and the relationship between local strategies and national departments will determine how much practical control regions receive.
The government is due to publish a 10-year plan for Britain later in the year, which is expected to provide further detail on infrastructure and the role of public control in essential services.
Companies considering investment will judge the regional model on delivery: how quickly decisions can be made, whether grid and skills constraints ease, and whether local institutions have enough authority to coordinate projects that currently require decisions from several parts of government.
The Commons statement sets the direction towards a more devolved industrial policy. The next phase will establish whether the redistribution of responsibility is matched by the finance and powers required to alter investment conditions on the ground.
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