Councillor Geraldine Coggins, the Green Party’s candidate for the Greater Manchester mayoral race, with recently elected Green MP Hannah Spencer (Alamy)

3 min read19 min

The election of Burnham as Labour MP for Makerfield in June triggered a by-election in the Greater Manchester Combined Authority, with polling day set for 30 July.

Labour has sought to portray the election next month as a two-horse race between itself, with candidate Bev Craig, the Manchester city council leader, and Reform UK’s Sian Astley, a newly elected local councillor. The Greens are running Geraldine Coggins, a councillor in Altrincham.

The government put into effect a change of electoral system from first-past-the-post to the supplementary vote, a preferential system under which voters will cast a first and second choice. Labour sources believe this will boost their chances of holding onto the mayoralty.

While optimism around the by-election has grown within Labour since Burnham’s upcoming coronation as leader and prime minister became clear, the Greens are still hopeful that the “Burnham bounce” is surmountable.

Senior Green insiders say the first week of the campaign has been overshadowed by the noise around Burnham’s ascent to Downing Street, but insist their party’s ground campaign is strong and support for Labour is “soft”.

The party led by Zack Polanski, who originally hails from Salford, believe there is “a lot of unease” among voters about the policies Labour has enacted in Greater Manchester, including “gentrification” and “the role of developers in pricing people out of the areas they want to be in”.

The Greens will emphasise their offers locally on affordable housing, rent controls and a policy of no more money to developers without guarantees of affordable housing targets.

Green figures also suspect that while Burnham is a better communicator than Keir Starmer, the former mayor may not be as radical in government as some on the left hoped. The party will be highlighting demands such as dropping the fiscal rules, public ownership rather than increased control and a concrete commitment to electoral reform nationally.

The Greens will be aiming for first-preference voters primarily, and senior insiders point out that YouGov polling from February showed Labour voters being more willing to tactically vote Green than the other way around.

Earleir this month, the Greens’ former leader, Caroline Lucas, told The House mag that her party would “throw everything” at the Manchester mayoral election after deciding not to run a full-throttle campaign in Makerfield. 

She compared the election next month to the by-election in Gorton and Denton in February, where Green candidate Hannah Spencer won 40 per cent of the vote to unseat Labour.

However, Labour sources counter that Burnham has changed the national picture since then and that the likelihood of the Greens repeating their success in Gorton and Denton is low, given they will not be able to target a particular demographic among voters across the combined authority in the way they did so effectively to secure Spencer’s win.

They also point out that Spencer finished fifth in the mayoral contest two years ago, and add that the Green vote share in the wards making up the whole combined authority in the recent local elections showed them placing significantly behind Labour and Reform, as it was concentrated in select areas.

“They’re trying to talk themselves into the race, but there’s no evidence for it,” a Labour source told PoliticsHome.

The Greater Manchester Combined Authority covers 27 parliamentary seats, making the scale of the by-election unprecedented in British politics.

The Conservative candidate is Trafford councillor Phil Eckersley, the Liberal Democrats are running Manchester councillor Richard Kilpatrick, and Restore Britain has grooming gangs campaigner Marlon West as its candidate.

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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.

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9 min read1 hr

Caroline Lucas would “love” for Zack Polanski to spend more time talking about the environment. It is not, historically, a criticism that one would have expected to be levelled at a Green Party leader, but the Corbynite-populist turn taken by the newcomer has frustrated some veterans of the party – while also bringing electoral success.

As a former leader of the party herself, Lucas is complimentary of Polanski, saying she considers him a friend, albeit one she doesn’t speak to often, given his busy schedule. “He has taken the Green Party into a whole new space,” she says, noting the party’s ballooning membership and recent wins, most notably in Gorton and Denton.

“Journalists used to say to me very frequently: ‘You’re just a one-issue party,’” she recalls. “Now Zack has broadened the agenda, and the criticism that sometimes gets levelled at Zack is: ‘What’s happened to the environment?’”

Asked whether she disagrees with the criticism, however, she admits: “I would love him to talk about it a little bit more.” She goes on to add: “But I understand entirely why he’s taken the decisions that he has, and even in recent weeks he certainly, from my hearing, is talking about it more.”

While Lucas is careful in her answers to acknowledge that it is Polanski who now runs the show, she is not afraid to intervene when she feels it’s needed – for example, calling for immediate action by the party when several of its candidates in the May local elections faced antisemitism allegations. Lucas “definitely still sees a role for herself” in the Greens, as long-time friend and adviser Cath Miller tells The House. “It’s an intrinsic part of her.”

Asked whether the intervention over antisemitism was a difficult one to make, Lucas says: “I felt that it needed to be said, and that the vast majority of people both inside and outside the party would agree with it. It just felt that I hadn’t seen it being said in quite those terms.”

One of her frustrations as leader, she says, was not being able to get involved in disciplinary issues – though she understands the reasoning behind that set-up, considering it was political interference that contributed to the Equality and Human Rights Commission’s decision to call Labour institutionally antisemitic in 2020.

The Greens also attracted controversy earlier this year when the party looked set to debate a controversial motion titled “Zionism is racism” at its spring conference. While the motion did not end up being debated, it could return in the autumn. What does Lucas make of the row?

She pauses before answering. “I’m not sure it’s a very helpful debate, in the sense that the way in which that motion was worded caused a lot of concern among people across the party.”

There is a vast difference between criticising the Israeli government and using terms about which Jewish Greens and others have raised concerns, she stresses. “Zionism can be interpreted in so many different ways, and there was a concern that some people thought the motion was talking more about individual Jewish people rather than the Israeli government.”

It is up to the party to decide what to discuss, Lucas adds, but she hopes the debate is held in a less “toxic” way next time.

The party has also been criticised by some in recent years for its expulsion of ‘gender-critical’ members who oppose its policy on self-identification. Does Lucas think the zero-tolerance approach that has been taken is the right one?

“As far as I know, people haven’t been expelled simply for being gender-critical and, if they have, that should never happen,” she says. Suspension as a result of someone being accused of transphobic language or actions is one thing, Lucas says, whereas those who are gender-critical but “perfectly respectful – I don’t think we should be hounding those people out of the party”.

It seems inevitable that as the Greens grow, factional infighting will become more common. When asked what her advice would be, Lucas strikes a maternal tone: “There needs to be an awful lot more willingness to hear views that aren’t necessarily your own. We need to find ways of handling difference in our party, and all parties, in a better way.”

She continues: “If there’s transphobia or homophobia or any kind of race hate, that is completely unacceptable. But most of this stuff is much more about differences of views that we ought to be able to find ways to handle better.”

In 1986, when Caroline Lucas first joined the Green Party, “The height of our ambitions was to save our deposit or win a seat on a local council,” she recalls in her 2015 book, Honourable Friends? Parliament and the Fight for Change. Expectations within the party look very different today.

The Green Party had already been doing well in the polls, but the election of London Assembly member and former deputy leader Polanski as leader in September turbocharged its popularity. In the contest last year, Lucas threw her support behind the more environment-focused and traditional pair of co-leader candidates, MPs Ellie Chowns and Adrian Ramsay.

Now, she says her concerns about a Polanski leadership were misplaced: “I mistakenly thought it was going to be a problem, not having the leadership within the parliamentary party.” The reality, she believes, is it has been an advantage, allowing Polanski to be more active in terms of media appearances.

Lucas, now 65, has a long history with the Green Party. After joining it back in 1986, she led the party for a decade in total between 2003 and 2018. She sat as a Green MP in Westminster for 14 years and served as an MEP for more than 10 years before that.

Since leaving the Commons in 2024, Lucas has more time on her hands. The House has travelled to meet her on the sunny campus of the University of Sussex where, in 2025, Lucas was appointed professor of practice in environmental sustainability. 

“There was a concern that some people thought the motion was talking more about individual Jewish people rather than the Israeli government”

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It is hours after the news has broken that Andy Burnham will return to Westminster. At one point she laughs about how they are talking of him as if he is already prime minister. “Let’s assume he will be pretty soon,” she says.

The possibility of the Greens partly forming the next government is an idea that has gained salience in recent months, particularly so in light of Burnham’s likely ascent to No 10.

Asked which role she would like to play in a hypothetical Labour-Green coalition, Lucas is keen to talk about the party rather than herself. She makes clear that she thinks the Greens should not resign themselves – in light of their recent success – to playing a minor role in such a government.

“We don’t even know which is going to be the most successful progressive party on the left at the next general election. So, let’s not assume that we’re the ones who are going to be the junior partners here. Let’s be ambitious.”

She also warns that history has shown the potential pitfalls awaiting those who enter coalitions. “What that would actually look like… is something that we’ve got to think incredibly carefully about,” she says, adding that the Liberal Democrats “gave an object lesson of how not to do coalition government, and we would certainly want to learn from that”.

Are there Green policies that could be watered down in preparation for a coalition, as reports suggest? “Those kinds of questions are so far ahead of where the debate is at right now, because it assumes the coalition government is the arrangement that most people would support,” she replies. “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves.”

Last month, reports emerged that a progressive alliance council was being formed by centre-left think tank Compass, of which Burnham ally Neal Lawson is director.

Lucas, who co-chairs the organisation, claims she knows little about it. “I imagine first and foremost, it’s about building trust and relationships now, well in advance of any election.”

Surprisingly, Lucas appears wary of going any further by embracing the progressive alliance movement too readily. “It’s true to say the Green Party’s fingers have been really burnt by it,” she says.

The idea has been “interpreted by Labour again and again as Greens being forced to stand down or being bullied into standing down”, Lucas argues. “There was no reciprocity to it at all, and that is not what a progressive alliance is. So, even that term now within the party is treated with understandable suspicion.”

But their recent wins mean the Greens now find themselves in a stronger position, Lucas says:

“There’s absolutely no way that the Greens are going to stand for being treated in that way.”

She insists that the foot is now “on the pedal” for the mayoral contest in Greater Manchester, triggered by Burnham’s new Westminster posting. 

“The Greens definitely will be throwing everything at that, and I would absolutely support them in so doing, and will be up there to do what I can to help,” Lucas says.

She is, however, excited by Burnham’s support for electoral reform, saying the pressure is now on to make sure he delivers on that as soon as possible.

It is up to the progressive movement as a whole, Lucas declares, to ensure that Burnham does not campaign left but govern right: “It would be a rash person to sit here and say: ‘He won’t do that,’ given our experience of recent Labour leaders.”

While no longer an MP, Lucas’ dedication to the Greens has not wavered. She points to the new Green think tank Verdant, of which she sits on the board and through which she is keen to help shape policy, as well as her role as co-president of the European Movement, an advocacy group that promotes European integration, which she hopes will allow her “a little bit of influence over the party’s new direction”.

“There’s plenty going on,” she says. “I’m not done yet.” 

Oldbury nuclear decommissioning site is a trailblazer for robotics and other innovative approaches, with NRS deploying robotics trials in South Gloucestershire to tackle some of the most challenging aspects of legacy waste management, reducing risk to workers and improving efficiency.

Two complementary project trials are underway at the site. The first, led by NRS as part of the Robotics and Artificial Intelligence Collaboration (RAICo) collaboration, involves teleoperated robotic arms for handling fuel element debris (FED).

FED is the material that historically housed nuclear fuel during generation and was removed to allow for the nuclear fuel to be separated and dispatched to Sellafield for reprocessing. This material, which is safely stored on site, must now be carefully retrieved and sorted as part of the decommissioning process.   

The second is Auto-SAS, an autonomous sorting and segregation system; led by NRS, funded by the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA) and delivered in collaboration with the NDA group and supply chain.

The main technology element is being delivered by ARCTEC, a global technology company that designs and manufactures 3D scanning hardware and software. Although both projects use robotics, they are solving different problems at different stages of waste management.

FED retrieval and sorting is an immediate operational challenge. NRS’s current approach to sorting FED requires people to work in demanding environments. The task involves operators suiting up in full PPE, and using manual tools with grippers on the end, operating over thick protective walls.

The trials are exploring whether a teleoperated robotic arm can give operators greater control while allowing them to work from a safer distance, reducing the need for direct human handling without disrupting the critical delivery path.

To overcome challenges associated with precision control of teleoperated robot grippers, NRS is working with the RAICo to integrate 3D visualisation tools and haptic control systems. These translate human hand movement direct to the robot, and resistance back to the operator’s hand.

Auto-SAS is a longer-term programme designed to autonomously identify, categorise and sort more complex mixed radioactive waste, particularly waste that is difficult to handle manually and may currently be directed to higher-cost disposal routes simply because it cannot be easily separated.

It’s an NDA funded group-wide demonstrator project, backed by £9.5 million of NDA investment over four years, the system combines robotics with sensing and characterisation technology to improve that process, reduce hazards and potentially deliver hundreds of millions of pounds in savings across the NDA group.

Phoebe Lynch, Head of Innovation at NRS, said:

“NRS is passionate about harnessing the value of our sites and teams to support innovation. This project showcases how NRS can add value through externally funded projects which bring benefits to our organisation and the wider NDA group.”

Prof Melanie Brownridge, NDA Chief R&D Officer, said:

“Across our 18 sites we’re using robotics and innovation to help accelerate our mission and move our people further from harm. The learning generated here has value well beyond the site, and both programmes are designed with scalability in mind.

Auto-SAS also has potential applications beyond the nuclear sector, with the technology capable of addressing complex waste sorting challenges in other industries.”

The work has been made possible through strong partnerships with RAICo, UKAEA and others across the NDA group, and reflects a wider commitment to using innovation in a focused, practical way. The goal is not innovation for its own sake, but using technology to remove people from harm, reduce costs and build capability for the future.”

Varun Kumar, Robotics Engineer at RAICo, said:

“There’s huge interest in robotic arms in decommissioning, but precision control and risk management are blockers. These projects should enable operators to perform skilled sorting tasks from a safe distance and even expand the role to operators who cannot work in restrictive environments.”

Active on-site commissioning and testing of Auto-SAS is expected to begin around mid-2027. In the meantime, the NRS robotic arm trials continue to build evidence for future deployment. Together, the two programmes represent exciting developments for the way nuclear waste is handled in the future.