Thomas Griffin: Beyond the Golden Triangle – unlocking Britain’s growth clusters

Thomas Griffin is the Global Ambassador for the Conservative Policy Forum and the Zurich Representative for Conservatives Abroad.

My last piece argued that Britain’s growth problem is not a shortage of capital, talent or innovation.

It is a failure to build the conditions around the places where those things already exist. The sharpest reply was a fair one: what does a booming Cambridge do for Burnley?

I am a Kent man who went to universities in the Midlands, whose family originates from London but settled in the South West, and who spent enough time in northern rugby league dressing rooms to be affectionately informed that I was still very much a southerner. It did not help that I played fullback rather than prop. But the question deserves a serious answer.

Britain’s productivity problem is, at heart, a regional one. In 2023, London produced almost 29 per cent more per hour worked than the UK average and the South East nearly 8 per cent more. Every other region fell below the line. Yet the gap is not destiny. Between 2019 and 2023, the North West grew its productivity faster than any other region and made the largest single contribution to national growth, while London’s output per hour actually fell. Something is working outside the South East. It is worth understanding what, and then doing far more of it.

If Britain’s growth model simply means concentrating ever more wealth in London, Oxford and Cambridge, then the criticism is justified. That would not be a national strategy; it would be a golden triangle strategy. But that is not what a clusters-first approach means, nor does it reflect where many of Britain’s strongest existing and emerging economic clusters are actually found. I cannot cover every region in this article but the examples below demonstrate the wider point: much of Britain’s unrealised potential lies outside the golden triangle of Oxford, Cambridge and London.

The Humber

Start on the estuary that most resembles the Dutch original. Siemens Gamesa’s blade factory at Hull’s Alexandra Dock, built with Associated British Ports and since expanded for a further £186 million, is the largest offshore wind manufacturing facility in the UK. The telling detail is local: of the thousand-plus jobs it created, around 98 per cent went to people living within thirty miles. Ørsted opened its Grimsby East Coast Hub as what it described as the ‘world’s largest offshore wind operations and maintenance centre.’

This is not an artificial cluster conjured by Whitehall. It already exists. What holds it back is the one thing no firm can build for itself: the shared infrastructure beneath the cluster, the grid capacity, the port connections, the timetable for joining the network. Build those, and the rest follows. Withhold them, and the next factory is built somewhere else entirely.

Lancashire

The question is not how to turn Burnley into Cambridge. It is how to allow Burnley to become more fully itself. Lancashire is already one of Britain’s most important aerospace regions, and Burnley is already an aerospace town.

The task is not to invent an industry. It is to remove the barriers that prevent an existing strength from expanding. Safran has made aircraft nacelles in Burnley for more than seventy years, employs around 700 people, and its UK arm turned over £185 million last year, up more than 15 per cent; its site is the global centre of excellence for sheet metal fabrication across the entire Safran group. Burnley sits inside the largest aerospace cluster in the UK, the heart of the only place in the country that can design, build and test a combat aircraft, anchored by BAE Systems and Rolls-Royce.

Yet the barriers in Burnley are mundane. Industrial premises are ageing. Supplier parks are hard to expand. Skills pipelines lag demand. Plus, Burnley sits outside the enterprise-zone designations that support the main BAE sites. The challenge is not discovering these capabilities. It is allowing them to grow.

Sheffield

Sheffield offers perhaps the clearest evidence that enabling institutions can attract growth rather than merely follow it. The Advanced Manufacturing Research Centre began in 2001 as a modest collaboration between the University of Sheffield and Boeing on reclaimed coalfield land. It now has more than 120 industrial partners, from Boeing and Rolls-Royce to McLaren and Airbus, and has drawn over £260 million of private investment into South Yorkshire.

The anchor mattered: Boeing chose Sheffield for its first European factory, and McLaren brought carbon-fibre chassis production back to Britain there, because the cluster was already in place. Its newest project, the £29.5 million COMPASS centre, was the first announcement of the South Yorkshire Investment Zone. The constraint now is scaling from world-class research into volume production, which needs durable planning and grid certainty rather than another research grant.

The South West

Not every cluster faces the same problem. In Cornwall, Spaceport Cornwall at Newquay, the UK’s first licensed spaceport, is now linked to the National Drone Hub at Predannack, the first civil-aviation-accredited drone test site in the country, with more than 8,000 square kilometres of segregated airspace off the Lizard run in partnership with the Royal Navy. Here the binding constraint is not land or grid. It is regulation: the airspace access, certification and operating permissions that move more slowly than the technology they govern. This is a nascent example, but it makes the point that enabling conditions are not always concrete and steel.

The Coventry Warning

There is a lesson in the other direction too. The proposed Coventry gigafactory won planning permission in 2022, yet years later still lacks an occupier. Britishvolt had a site and a vision – and failed. Planning permission alone is not enough. Rotterdam did not approve a project and hope. From the 1988 designation of its mainport onward, it provided transport, energy, land and decades of unbroken political commitment together, as a system. Half-built conditions attract nobody. Britain has become very good at announcing strategies and surprisingly poor at completing them.

One ask, a statutory right to grow

The instinct in Whitehall, and Labour’s instinct in particular, is to disperse: to spread money by formula so that no place reaches the critical mass that compounds, to fund chosen programmes rather than build foundations every firm can use, and to confuse the announcement with the delivery. The building blocks mostly exist already in freeports, investment zones and enterprise zones: tax reliefs, capital allowances, site preparation and planning tools.

But the package is incomplete, especially where grid connection and strategic planning remain outside the entitlement. The problem is not only what is offered, but how it is handed out: through time-limited Whitehall bidding rounds, with reliefs that expire on fixed dates. A town like Burnley cannot win a beauty contest against better-resourced bidders. It can, though, meet an objective test, because it already has a major industrial anchor.

So the ask is a single one, and the design matters. Replace the bidding round with a statutory right that a place qualifies for by passing objective, published tests rather than by winning a Whitehall contest. Two tests do the work.

First, proven private investment in the sector over the past decade, which is the market’s own verdict on where a cluster really exists and cannot be faked by a speculative bid. Second, genuine supply-chain density, a concentration of connected firms rather than a lone factory, which is what actually generates compounding growth.

A place that passes both gains guaranteed priority treatment in the grid connections process and the strategic planning status to clear its one binding constraint. This is not the state overriding the market. The connection queue is already publicly governed and already shifting from first-come-first-served towards a “first-ready-and-needed” model. The flaw is that Whitehall currently defines that “need” almost entirely around clean-power targets, as though regional industrial growth and the tax revenues it funds were not themselves strategic national priorities.

A statutory entitlement need not mean thin gruel spread everywhere. The tests reward existing concentration, so the policy deepens strong places rather than shuffling activity between weak ones, and grid priority is physically finite, so it cannot be handed to everywhere at once. The rule concentrates by design. Write the qualifying tests into primary legislation, so the right is fixed in law rather than left to Treasury discretion or a quango that can be captured and quietly turned against growth, and a town like Burnley stops re-auditioning every few years for the conditions it has already earned.

Let our strongest regional clusters become stronger still. The golden triangle does not exhaust our economic potential; most of it, it turns out, lies somewhere else entirely. This is not regional policy as charity; it is essential to national growth policy, because Britain can no longer afford to spread decline evenly.