Published on 14 January 2025
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Making sense of Labour’s modern industrial strategy

In this policy brief, Geoff White, Peter Tyler, and Colin Warnock map out how the Labour Government's Green Paper - Invest 2035 - could be strengthened to serve as a comprehensive Industrial Strategy in the White Paper due to be released in Spring 2025.

This policy brief sets out the ways in which the Labour Government’s Green Paper – Invest 2035 – could be strengthened if it is to make sense as a fully-fledged Industrial Strategy in the White Paper promised for Spring 2025.

We make three key points:

1. The Strategy’s objective is to induce stronger growth in ways that will also promote Net Zero, regional growth, and economic security and resilience. However, the latter are currently cast almost as subsidiary objectives. We suggest that Net Zero, regional growth and security/resilience should become primary objectives to shape the type of growth being pursued.

2. The Strategy should spell out clearly how this is to be achieved by focusing on the priority mission driving technologies and places as well as sectors where investment, innovation and productivity will be promoted to lever transformative and sustainable growth across the country. This will require:

  • A wider sectoral framework which recognises that absorption of innovation and good practice are essential for growth and that there are distinct mechanisms in different sectoral categories by which this will take place and can be promoted.
  • A place-based framework that depicts the relative needs and opportunities of different places and the appropriate strategic policy direction for each combination of need and opportunity – including those places most likely to remain left behind.

3. A wide range of policy instruments (including fiscal incentives as well as funding, regulation, and procurement) and the balance between their devolved and national delivery should be identified and mapped against the priority mission driving sectors, technologies and places.


Policy brief: Making sense of Labour’s modern industrial strategy

Authors

Professor Pete Tyler

Affiliated Researcher

Pete Tyler is Emeritus Professor of Urban and Regional Economics at the University of Cambridge, UK, and Emeritus Professorial Fellow of St Catharine’s College, Cambridge, UK. His research interests cover...

Geoff White

Geoff White is an economist who worked in HM Treasury and the Department of Trade and Industry before directing a wide range of policy evaluations with PwC, Public and Corporate...

Colin Warnock

Colin Warnock is an economist specialising in the appraisal, monitoring and evaluation of economic development, housing and regeneration projects.  His evaluation experience spans four decades and includes enterprise zones, regional...

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