Last week the Government published its industrial strategy for us all to chew over in the months ahead. The Brexit siren makes it pretty hard to hear much else at the moment but this strategy is something we really need to engage with and get right. It seeks to understand what the UK is good at, which markets we are likely to succeed in and what infrastructure, skills, research and regulatory structures are needed to make it a success. And there’s a regional dimension as well, which will be built on in the plans being developed by our Local Enterprise Partnership.
An industrial strategy is not to everyone’s taste - previous versions in this country led to the overly centralised, heavily regulated industry of the seventies. However, I’m rather impressed by what I’ve read in the Government’s green paper.
Whenever I visit businesses locally they tell me that we have three main problems in Somerset: there isn’t the workforce, when there is it doesn’t have the right skills, and we have poor connections – both physically and digitally – with the outside world. We also know that we suffer from not having a university in the county, both as a way of delivering a graduate workforce as well as being a catalyst for research and development.
Yet we also know what we’re good at. We have a great defence and aerospace industry as well as tourism, agriculture and energy. The key to our industrial strategy is in working out how we take those industries, understand where the opportunities are within them and then make policies locally and nationally that deliver success.
Joined up thinking is not always associated with Whitehall. But on this, there’s a real danger that we might manage it.