What does re-industrialisation mean for Yorkshire?

Cogs and bolts on a workbench. 
Steph Morris, Yorkshire Universities Associate

Steph examines what greater devolution and re-industrialisation could mean for Yorkshire, highlighting the region’s existing business strengths and the opportunities for policy makers, businesses and universities to work together to drive growth.

Since becoming Prime Minister in July, Andy Burnham has made it clear that re-industrialising Britain is one of the top priorities of his leadership1.  Re-industrialisation – rebuilding the ability of places to make, design and export things2 – will only succeed if the number and scale of high-productivity private sector businesses across the UK can be grown. In order to drive economic growth, re-industrialisation needs to focus on strengthening both goods and services sectors that have the capacity to generate income for the UK through exports3.

Andy Burnham’s place-based approach to reindustrialisation aims to deliver ‘good growth in every postcode across the whole of the UK’4. The Prime Minister has set out a plan for re-wiring the state and has pledged to ‘be relentless in giving people and places, ownership and control’5. This will involve a triple helix approach to local leadership, in which policy makers, businesses, and further education / higher education institutions work together to identify opportunities for growth and to understand trade-offs. Places will need to consider how best to use public resources to ensure that economic growth benefits all parts of the region – not just city centres, but also outer city suburbs, towns and rural areas. There also needs to be careful consideration of how national security and resilience can be strengthened through strategic regional investments in ‘sovereign’ capabilities in key sectors. These decisions will need to be taken in the context of a dynamic landscape for global trade which can result in significant local effects.

Under the Prime Minister’s approach to devolution, local leaders will be empowered to make decisions about the sectors which they believe have the potential to deliver the greatest economic uplift for their areas. This idea in itself is not new. Richard Jones has written on the lessons learned from the establishment of the Advanced Manufacturing Research Centre (AMRC) in South Yorkshire and Atom Valley in Greater Manchester, where policy makers have collaborated with universities, colleges, businesses, developers and investors to deliver facilities with the potential to transform local economies6. What is new however, is the extent of devolution which will enable local leaders to exert far greater control over place-based policies and investments than has previously been possible.

How might this move towards enhanced devolution and re-industrialisation impact on Yorkshire’s economy?

Policy

Looking first at the policy strand of the triple helix, Yorkshire and the Humber appears to be in an advantageous position to maximise the opportunities presented by re-industrialisation. The region has full devolution, with three Mayoral Strategic Authorities (in West, South and North Yorkshire) and a Mayoral Combined Authority (in Hull & East Yorkshire). Each of these authorities has published a Local Growth Plan, setting out a 10-year framework to drive productivity and growth. Collectively, these plans share some common themes that apply across Yorkshire as a whole. For example, all four sub-regions identify economic growth opportunities underpinned by advanced manufacturing, while focusing on a range of different technologies and application sectors based on local strengths. There are similar common threads running across all four sub-regions in other priority sectors such as health & life sciences, clean energy, defence and the digital and creative industries. There are also commonalities in the approaches to business support, with all four sub-regions looking to strengthen their innovation ecosystems; support start-ups, SMEs and scale-ups; develop skills; and attract increased investment into local businesses. These shared priorities present an opportunity for policy-makers in Yorkshire to collaborate and align their activities so the region as a whole can benefit from re-industrialisation.

The Private Sector

When considering the second strand of the triple helix – the private sector – building a picture of regional strengths and growth opportunities is more complex. Many businesses do not fit neatly into single sector categories, and their workforces and supply chains often span administrative boundaries. The UKRI-funded Yorkshire Policy Engagement and Research Network (Y-PERN) has been analysing regional business data to explore Yorkshire’s strengths across the eight priority sectors in the UK’s Industrial Strategy (IS8). The intention is to provide intelligence to help policy makers, nationally, regionally and locally, to identify investment opportunities and develop place-based policies that stimulate business growth.

Initial findings from this analysis carried out by Dr Dan Olner indicate, for example, that there are considerable regional business strengths in manufacturing. Yorkshire boast a higher concentration of metal manufacturing firms than the UK average, reflecting its longstanding industrial heritage. However, when looking specifically at manufacturing businesses that fall within the IS definition of ‘advanced manufacturing’, the picture is more mixed, with around half of the region demonstrating a lower concentration of advanced manufacturing jobs as a proportion of the overall local economy than the national average. The data suggest that there are potential trade-offs between growth in employment and growth in productivity that will need careful consideration to ensure impacts at local levels can be understood. Interestingly, the majority of places in Yorkshire have a higher-than-average concentration of jobs in the foundational sectors which underpin the high value activities of the IS8 sectors. This underlines the importance of considering the economy as a whole when developing strategies and policies for growth, as high productivity sectors need to be built on strong foundations.

The research suggests that there are hot spots throughout the region where productivity and employment are increasing. Evidence indicates that these concentrations of local growth are not limited to the big cities, which bodes well for the region’s ability to equitably distribute the benefits of economic growth resulting from reindustrialisation. This work to understand regional business strengths is still underway and it will be important to continue to build a more granular understanding of business trends, clusters and trading patterns in order for local leaders to effectively tailor place-based economic policies in the way Andy Burnham has set out.        

The Higher Education Sector

That leaves the third part of the triple helix – the higher education sector. The Prime Minister has made it clear that he sees universities ‘at the heart of local economies’7. This approach is fully aligned with the aims of Yorkshire Universities (YU), as set out in the 2025-2030 strategy: Powering Place, Unlocking Potential8. The twelve Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) across Yorkshire teach a broad range of subjects at undergraduate and postgraduate levels, producing over 87,000 graduates per year, equipped with the skills and technical expertise that will be essential to enable growth in priority sectors. Universities in the region have significant breadth and depth of research capability across a wide range of disciplines, and work collaboratively with businesses and public sector bodies to drive innovation in key sectors including health, manufacturing, clean energy, defence and the creative industries. As a regional group, YU brings together HEIs with diverse and complementary specialisms and provides routes for effective engagement with policy makers, cluster bodies, community groups and businesses. YU’s Executive Director, Peter O’Brien, set out the value of regional HE groups in a recent blog for WonkHE, co-authored with colleagues from Universities North East England (UNEE) and Midlands Innovation9. YU’s model of regional HE partnership has proven so impactful that similar regional groupings have recently been established elsewhere in the UK to maximise the impact of HEIs on their local and regional economies.

In addition to teaching and research, universities support regional economic growth through provision of analysis, insight and evaluation for policy makers. In Yorkshire, the Y-PERN and YPIP programmes have provided expertise and capacity from the HE sector to help Local and Combined Authorities across the region to engage with communities, understand the connections and trade-offs between different policy areas, and evaluate the effectiveness of policy interventions. These programmes have been particularly valuable at a time when the analytical capacity with local and regional government organisations has been greatly reduced.

If the Government is serious about empowering local leaders to tailor policies for economic growth to the needs and capabilities of their places, then consideration needs to be given to how policy-makers will access the evidence and insight they need to make informed decisions. UKRI grant funding for Y-PERN and YPIP is now ending. It is welcome that Yorkshire & Humber Councils has committed financial support for network coordination within and across Y-PERN for the next three years, to be situated alongside capacity and leadership support from YU and its members institutions. However, there is a risk that the joined-up capability surrounding research-policy engagement in the region will come under stress unless further sustainable funding can be secured. At the same time, recent delays to the publication of ONS data sets such as labour force statistics10 are hampering local leaders’ ability to obtain current intelligence on regional growth trends.

For devolved government to work effectively, local places need their universities to develop a skilled workforce and provide cutting-edge research and innovation. One of the lessons from Greater Manchester is that local leaders also benefit when they have access to local and regional analytical expertise and capacity to produce place-based policies. But for universities to contribute towards these functions, on behalf of their local places, they need to be properly funded.

We would encourage the Government to engage with regional HE sector groups, such as YU, to understand the vital role that universities play in achieving the Prime Minister’s vision of economic growth for every postcode.

Sources

  1. Andy Burnham’s first speech as Prime Minister, 20 July 2026, https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/andy-burnhams-first-speech-as-prime-minister-20-july-2026 
  2. Reindustrialisation: what Burnham means and what the policy position does, The Burnham Programme, https://theburnhamprogramme.co.uk/reindustrialisation
  3. Briefing Burnham: Reindustrialisation and industrial policy, Centre for Cities, 15 July 2026, https://www.centreforcities.org/blog/briefing-burnham-reindustrialisation-and-industrial-policy/
  4. Prime Minister pledges growth in every postcode across whole of UK as he visits Scotland, 23 July 2026, https://www.gov.uk/government/news/prime-minister-pledges-growth-in-every-postcode-across-whole-of-uk-as-he-visits-scotland
  5. PM statement to the House of Commons, Prime Minister’s Office, 1 September 2026, https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/pm-statement-to-the-house-of-commons-1-september-2026
  6. Andy Burnham, Manchesterism, and Reindustrialisation, Richard Jones, 23 May 2026, https://softmachines.org/?p=3305
  7. Andy Burnham Speech at the People’s History Museum, Manchester – 29 June 2026, https://andyburnham.org.uk/2026/07/20/andy-burnham-speech-at-the-peoples-history-museum-manchester-29-june-2026/
  8. Powering Place, Unlocking Potential: 2025-2030 Strategy, Yorkshire Universities, 2025, https://yorkshireuniversities.ac.uk/vision-strategy/
  9. Regional and local engagement is mission critical for the HE sector, WonkHE, 24 August 2026, https://wonkhe.com/blogs/regional-and-local-engagement-is-mission-critical-for-the-he-sector/
  10. The road ahead for the Transformed Labour Force Survey, Office for national Statitics, 11 August 2026, https://blog.ons.gov.uk/2026/08/11/the-road-ahead-for-the-transformed-labour-force-survey/
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