Local Industrial Strategies

Thursday 13th June 2019 Written Statements

[The Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (Greg Clark)]

Our modern industrial strategy is a long-term plan to boost productivity and earning power for people throughout the country.

Since 2010, local leaders, working in partnership with Government, have delivered historic city deals with Greater Manchester. There have been multiple devolution agreements resulting in devolved new powers including bus reform, the adult education budget and growth deal funding of £633 million.

Building on these strong foundations, we set out in the modern industrial strategy to work in partnership with places to develop local industrial strategies. Local industrial strategies are central to our aim of creating prosperous communities across the country. They are being developed locally and agreed with government. They are long-term, based on clear evidence and aligned to the modern industrial strategy.

On 16 May we launched the first of these strategies, the West Midlands local industrial strategy. Today we are launching the Greater Manchester local industrial strategy. This has been developed locally by the Greater Manchester combined authority, led by Mayor Andy Burnham, and Sir Richard Leese, Leader of Manchester City Council, supported by the local enterprise partnership and Greater Manchester partners, and agreed with Government.

This ambitious strategy sets out how Greater Manchester will work in partnership with Government to:

Set Greater Manchester up to be a global leader on health and care innovation, creating new industries and jobs, improving population health and extending healthy life expectancy, and working to identify a home for a prospective international centre for healthy ageing;

Position Greater Manchester as a world leading region for innovative firms to experiment with, develop and adopt advanced materials in manufacturing, including University of Manchester work to establish “Graphene City” in the centre;

Build on Greater Manchester’s position as a leading European digital city-region, to maximise growing assets in cyber security;

Enable the digitalisation of all sectors, and capitalise on the links between digital and creative industries that feed internationally significant clusters in broadcasting, content creation and media;

Launch the UK’s first city-region clean growth mission to achieve carbon neutral living in Greater Manchester by 2038; and

Ensure that the education, skills and employment system allow everyone to reach their potential and employers have access to the skills required to deliver the Greater Manchester local industrial strategy.

Greater Manchester is a growing economy with a growing population of 2.8 million. Our shared national and local ambition is for the Greater Manchester local industrial strategy to boost productivity and people’s earning power through our collaborative national, regional and local leadership, recognising the economic strengths and potential of Greater Manchester.

A copy of the Greater Manchester local industrial strategy will be placed in the Libraries of both Houses.

[HCWS1616]