The recent government review of the UK’s industrial strategy offers an important moment for reflection. While the national framework sets out clear priorities – focusing on high-growth sectors such as advanced manufacturing, clean energy, digital technologies, and life sciences – it also raises questions about how local authorities, particularly combined authorities, can translate these priorities into regional impact.
Progress under locally-led Regional Industrial Strategy
The North East was among the first regions to initiate a Regional Industrial Strategy (RIS), designed to coordinate investment, infrastructure, skills, and inclusive growth. As part of this approach, Newcastle and surrounding authorities were positioned to take strategic control of their economic future. This framework:
- Linked investment decisions to regional strengths in advanced manufacturing, energy, and the digital economy
- Aligned skills development with current and emerging sectoral needs
- Integrated transport and infrastructure planning to support economic corridors
- Prioritized inclusive economic outcomes, ensuring growth benefited communities across the region.
This strategy represented a deliberate effort to exercise self-determination, enabling combined authorities to plan and deliver growth in a coordinated, coherent way. Early progress demonstrated that a clear, locally-driven framework could align public and private sector activity, attracting investment while maintaining a focus on long-term economic resilience and equity.
Shifts in direction: responding to national agendas
Recent policy developments, particularly the government’s focus on Growth Zones, signal a shift in approach. Where once local authorities set the agenda, much of the current emphasis is on responding to centrally-defined priorities, including sectoral growth targets, spatial development zones, and national R&D investments.
This shift is neither inherently negative nor inevitable. Growth Zones present real opportunities to accelerate infrastructure delivery, unlock private investment, and scale innovation projects. The challenge is ensuring that these initiatives are integrated into a regional strategy, rather than implemented in isolation or as standalone projects.
Local authorities now have the chance to leverage this national agenda to enhance long-term regional growth, but doing so requires a deliberate and strategic approach: connecting investment decisions to local strengths, aligning skills and workforce development, and using combined authority powers to coordinate delivery.
Newcastle: opportunities for strategic impact
Newcastle City Council’s recent participation in Expo Real provides a useful case study. The city highlighted housing developments, student accommodation, and major waterfront regeneration projects. These initiatives demonstrate a clear commitment to economic development and urban renewal, but there is an opportunity to make them part of a broader industrial strategy narrative.
By strategically linking these projects to sectoral growth, innovation, and skills development, Newcastle could demonstrate how visible, operational projects serve long-term industrial objectives. For example:
- Waterfront regeneration could incorporate advanced manufacturing, green energy, or digital innovation hubs
- Student accommodation and educational infrastructure could be explicitly aligned with skills pipelines for high-growth sectors
- Housing and placemaking projects could support inclusive growth, ensuring benefits reach diverse communities.
Viewed this way, Newcastle’s investments become strategic levers, helping the city influence national agendas while strengthening regional resilience. The combined authority framework offers additional levers—planning, transport, and economic development powers—that, if used strategically, can amplify impact.
Opportunities for local authorities
Across the North East, local authorities face a moment of potential. The National Industrial Strategy and Growth Zone framework provide a platform to advance locally-led priorities, but only if approached with clarity and purpose. Key opportunities include:
- Aligning national and local priorities
By mapping local industrial strengths against national sectoral focus areas, authorities can ensure that Growth Zone funding and programmes reinforce rather than supplant regional ambitions.
- Leveraging Combined Authority powers
Powers over planning, transport, skills, and infrastructure can be used to coordinate investments, attract private sector partners, and unlock innovation, ensuring that local projects deliver measurable industrial impact.
- Driving inclusive growth
Embedding equity and inclusion into all projects ensures that investment benefits communities widely, sustaining both social and economic outcomes.
- Building partnerships
Collaboration with universities, FE colleges, local enterprises, and anchor institutions can strengthen skills pipelines, support R&D, and foster innovation, aligning workforce development with sectoral growth.
- Using Visibility to Influence
Platforms like Expo Real or other investment forums are not only marketing opportunities; they can also signal strategic intent, helping regions influence investor decisions and national policy discussions.
- Monitoring and evaluating impact
Establishing clear metrics and evaluation frameworks ensures that local authorities can track progress, adapt strategies, and demonstrate results, building credibility and attracting further investment.
Constructive reflections
The National Industrial Strategy review illustrates the interdependence between national direction and regional ambition. While central policy sets parameters and provides funding opportunities, regional leadership remains essential to translate these into meaningful local outcomes.
Newcastle and the wider North East have a unique advantage: early RIS development and Combined Authority structures provide a foundation of strategic thinking and coordination that many regions lack. The opportunity now is to leverage national initiatives without losing sight of local priorities: ensuring that projects are aligned, inclusive, and innovation-driven, and that Combined Authorities are actively shaping, not merely reacting to, national agendas.
This is the space where strategic thinkers and delivery-focused practitioners—like Building Bridges—can add value: helping local authorities navigate national frameworks, identify actionable opportunities, and implement solutions that strengthen the region’s industrial base, enhance skills, and deliver inclusive growth.
From projects to strategy
The review of the National Industrial Strategy is not just a policy up-date, it is a reminder that local authorities are the bridge between national ambition and regional delivery. The North East has demonstrated that locally-led strategy can drive coherence, attract investment, and enable inclusive growth.
The challenge – and opportunity – now is to integrate national Growth Zones and sectoral initiatives into this foundation, ensuring that visible projects, like those presented by Newcastle at Expo Real, are part of a connected industrial strategy rather than standalone efforts.
By doing so, the region can transform operational milestones into strategic levers for long-term productivity, innovation, and inclusive economic success, demonstrating both foresight and leadership within the national framework.
