The UK has had no shortage of industrial strategies in the last two decades. Having led on one during my time as director general at BIS, I have watched successive iterations with interest. Most have had good intentions but limited staying power.
So, is this latest strategy different? It certainly could be. Let’s consider it through the four S’s that I believe define a good industrial strategy: strategic focus, sustained commitment, systemic reach, and meaningful scale.
Strategic focus means making deliberate choices: being clear about what not to do and concentrating resources where they can have the biggest impact. The new strategy is unapologetically selective – targeting growth markets and sectors where the UK has a comparative advantage, and amplifying agglomeration in city-regions with the potential to be globally competitive clusters.
It also signals a welcome shift in narrative: from endless debates about “picking winners” to a focus on “backing winners” – sectors and businesses that markets have already signalled as competitive today or with high future potential. In an era where other countries are actively shaping their own growth sectors, the logical response for the UK is to either step up or accept that other countries will lead in key areas. Hoping for success without action is wishful thinking.
Sustained commitment is equally critical. Economic transformation doesn’t happen over a parliamentary cycle—it takes decades. Encouragingly, this strategy is framed as a 10-year plan, and backed by the Spending Review, a statutory Industrial Strategy Council, and a serious monitoring and evaluation plan. This, combined with visible support from the prime minister and chancellor, should help the strategy to stay on course – as long as that support doesn’t waver now that the big announcements are over and the hard graft of policy delivery begins.
Systemic reach is where this strategy feels most distinctive. South Korea’s global leadership in semiconductors, electronics, batteries, cars and 5G wasn’t just about subsidies. It stemmed from a joined-up approach across education, immigration, R&D and innovation, defence and procurement, infrastructure and planning, trade policy, finance, and cultural policy. Engineers in research labs for the country’s leading firms were even exempted from compulsory national service.
The UK’s approach echoes some of this intent. The strategy’s impressive technical annex lists fourteen policy areas that are in scope, spanning as many departments, along with key regulators and agencies. It goes well beyond R&D and business support – incorporating planning reform, visas, procurement, regulation, and tax – not always a given in these exercises. The sector plans also appear genuinely holistic, considering all the factors that make a sector internationally competitive.
Of course, delivery will be a challenge. Reforming planning or procurement has been attempted by many a government. And sustaining focus across a dozen or more departments is no small feat, particularly when industrial strategy is not always the key priority for all of them. This will require not just excellent civil service machinery but deliberate, sustained use of political capital to prioritise and unblock. But the signal is clear: this is not just DBT’s agenda. It is a whole-of-government endeavour.
The hardest of the four to judge is scale. Is the strategy sufficient to move the needle on national growth, investment, and productivity? The ambition is there: to unlock hundreds of billions in private investment – the kind of quantum required to begin closing the UK’s £2trn capital stock gap relative to high-productivity peers. But whether this is deliverable depends on a strong, trust-based partnership with businesses and credible delivery of the key reforms and programmes.
Which brings us to the crux: implementation. Execution will need to proceed with pace and precision, cutting through inevitable bureaucratic friction. This may expose trade-offs not yet fully acknowledged. If that results in too many compromises, it will dilute the power of the strategy, both as a device to create stability and predictability and as a coherent set of policy interventions.
The opportunity is clear. By embracing a truly systemic approach – one that cuts across silos, uses every policy lever available, and keeps delivery at its heart – this strategy has the potential to achieve what so many before it could not: a meaningful shift in the UK’s growth trajectory and global competitiveness.
Tera Allas is a former senior civil servant. Her last role in the civil service was director general, strategy, analysis and better regulation, from 2011-2014, where she led on the iteration of industrial strategy and plan for growth. She was concurrently deputy head of the UK Government Economic Service. Allas is currently an honorary professor at Alliance Manchester Business School, University of Manchester