By Nick Isles (Director, CPRMB)
1 July 2025
Is the newly announced Modern Industry Strategy the real deal? Might be the question on everyone’s lips after a succession of industrial strategies over the past 15 years. I think the answer is maybe. Maybe there is now a longer term and more joined up approach to the state taking on higher levels of risk in order to turbo charge new growth, new jobs and new ambition. As the strategy states, “Technological advances in Life Sciences, Clean Energy, and Artificial Intelligence are profoundly reshaping our economy, with the potential for enormous growth. This requires a more muscular approach to government.”
Focusing on eight specific sectors (called the IS-8) does enable other areas of government spending (such as on skills) to be more focused. The strategy also has much talk about where this investment and these industries need to be grown – city regions across those parts of Britain that have been the hardest hit by the demise of the older more traditional industries. Places such as the North East, South Wales, the North West and South Yorkshire all receive name checks thus: “The Industrial Strategy is unashamedly place-based, recognising that stronger regional growth is critical for the competitiveness of the IS-8 and the resilience of the national economy: we will therefore focus our efforts on the city regions and clusters with the highest potential to support our growth-driving sectors.“
Finally distributing 50% of the senior civil service to Darlington, York and Manchester will help bring spending and investment to those cities and their regions.
However the strategy makes little mention of who will be working in these sectors and, most importantly, how this workforce will be delivered. It acknowledges the system does not work for some; that too many young people have not progressed in the education system; that apprenticeship numbers have fallen for young people; that adult education and business investment in training per worker has fallen steeply, and we have significant skills shortages. It states that only 9% of secondary vocational learners are studying in engineering, manufacturing, and construction, compared to the OECD average of 32%. Finally business knows the current skills system needs urgent change. Further Education should be first and foremost part of the skills system. Supply side boosts to productivity through gaining qualifications do not seem to boost productivity anymore unless linked to rights to practice. That is the lesson of the last 20 years.
If we then look through a more gender sensitive lens there is a problem with many men and boys, usually with low levels of prior educational attainment, who are not economically active living, but not working, in city regions targeted by the Modern Industrial Strategy.
To take one example, ONS Labour Force Survey data suggests that some 21% out of the 26% inactive working age (16-64) people in Blaenau Gwent at the end of 2023 were actually men. So more than one in five of the working age male population of Blaenau Gwent is not looking for work or are unable to. Blaenau Gwent is part of the Cardiff Capital Region and in the Welsh Valleys and this is an excerpt from the Modern Industrial Strategy on how the government intends to enable investment in some of the IS-8 in the Cardiff Capital Region:
‘We will invest at least £445 million to enhance rail networks in Wales……South Wales and Bristol, through new stations between Cardiff and the Severn Tunnel. This will create further opportunities for the IS-8 clusters along the corridor, complementing wider government support, including for the Celtic Freeport and Cardiff and Newport Investment Zone and a new Centre for Doctoral Training led by Swansea University focused on semiconductors.’
How does this help the people of Blaenau Gwent access the new IS-8 industry jobs? At the last census there were 66,000 people living in Blaenau Gwent. Of these 17,160 were economically inactive and of these 13,860 were men. Economic inactivity in Blaenau Gwent has an overwhelmingly gendered dimension. These are the people that the industrial strategy needs to help get off welfare and into good work. Perhaps by tying government investment into a partnership with the businesses benefitting from that investment into meaningful work-based training and apprenticeship schemes, government money can turbo charge a new era of reduced economic inactivity and unemployment as the New Deals did in the late 1990s. The priority has to be to ensure the FE Colleges and private training providers in this part of Wales are ready to meet this challenge. .
To conclude: the key principle at work in the new Modern Industrial Strategy of cross government buy-in and decision-making needs to have added to it a cross government focus on being gender sensitive. A Minister for Men and Boys anyone?