An interesting and timely question! I hope you don’t mind some reflections based on my experience at Manchester and Sheffield. In my five years at the University of Manchester, from 2020 until my retirement last September, I handled relations between the University, the city and the combined authority, and was quite closely involved in discussions about GMCAs economic strategy. I was an inaugural board member of the Atom Valley Mayoral Development Zone, and contributed to developing that strategy. Burnham was strongly committed to that project and stayed personally involved. While AB very much gave credit to Sir Howard Bernstein and Richard Leese for their part in the resurrection of Manchester’s city centre, his political priorities were moving towards spreading that economic success to the outlying boroughs - not least because his mandate was very much a whole GM vote. North East Greater Manchester - Rochdale, Bury and Oldham - have some of the weakest regional economies in England, with very low productivity and a whole host of other social issues; AB’s home turf of Wigan and Leigh is a little stronger, but not much.
If Manchesterism is anything, it is Richard Leese’s doctrine that there’s no point talking about wealth redistribution if there’s no wealth to distribute, so economic growth has to come first, and I think AB has internalised this. What Rochdale, Bury and Oldham need is more high productivity private sector businesses. Knowledge intensive business services work for central Manchester, but that’s a city centre, agglomeration story, hence the need to focus on manufacturing, and the motivation for the Atom Valley development.
How does one actually re-industrialise? My perspective on this is shaped by my time at Sheffield, where I saw the success of the University of Sheffield’s Advanced Manufacturing Research Centre (AMRC) in rejuvenating the manufacturing economies of Sheffield and Rotherham. The measure of that success is significant new inward investment in high value sectors - the Rolls-Royce turbine blade factory, the Boeing factory making aircraft components, the McLaren factory making composite sports-car components. We’re also seeing some of the more traditional firms expanding - Sheffield Forgemasters, now MoD owned, significantly expanding its facilities for forging components for submarines, Special Melted Products, now with Taiwanese investment to expand production of high value parts from speciality steels and other alloys.
AMRC did have a catalytic role in all this. It was founded as a collaboration between a university academic and a local SME making tools, who realised they needed to raise their game if they were going to be able to sell to primes like Boeing and Rolls-Royce. As someone interested in machine tools you will appreciate the fact that their original technology development was to optimise the process of machining titanium, increasing the throughput by more than an order of magnitude. It was this advance that Rolls-Royce cited in their decision to build a factory in NE England rather than Singapore.
AMRC works because it allows firms to test out new manufacturing technologies at industrial scale, using industrial machine tools. But we realised that innovation wasn’t enough, and to build an advanced manufacturing cluster you need skilled people, so an important part of the story was building an apprentice training centre. This has to operate at a high enough standard to have the trust of Rolls-Royce & Boeing, but it also is open to local engineering firms to use to, which I think has a significant effect on raising standards across the whole local manufacturing sector.
The AMRC experience was very much in our minds in planning the strategy for Atom Valley - helped by the fact that the major landowner in Atom Valley was Haworth Estates, who also owned the Rotherham Advance Manufacturing Park. Economic incentives matter, of course, so the argument that we have to use to convince them is that building a high value manufacturing cluster will bring them a bigger land value uplift than the default option of a logistics/warehousing park.
It seems to me that if you want to grow the high value manufacturing sector there are three possible routes, all of which should reinforce each other. You support the existing business base, both through helping them access innovation and skills, and through helping them find the right premises, with the right infrastructure, to expand into. Despite its overall weak economy, there are good manufacturing firms in Rochdale, Oldham and Bury. You can go into a Victorian weaving shed, and find a bunch of looms weaving advanced materials like Dyneema and carbon fibre into high value technical textiles; one of the UK’s few remaining semiconductor fabs is located in Oldham. You can attract international firms operating at the technological frontier, as Sheffield did with Boeing. Or you can support spin-outs and start-ups to grow in the UK (rather than seeing them disappear to Germany or Taiwan or California, as so often happens now).
So this is the plan for Atom Valley. It’s main selling point is that it is a very large and attractive development site, big enough for a gigafactory, with a commitment from local government to allow construction, supporting that with grid connections, road access, and building all the associated necessary infrastructure (including new housing and transport links). The University of Manchester is supporting that by running an innovation centre, focused on the translational research needed to support industry, in Rochdale, and we’ve built much closer links with the local FE colleges, to build the skills system that a more productive manufacturing economy will need.
As you observe, advanced materials and manufacturing isn’t the only sector prioritised in GM’s economic plans. Digital and AI already is a very strong sector for Manchester. The history of this is interesting, as it does hark back to the days of Cottonopolis - the rag trade produced catalogue selling, that turned into e-commerce, and from there to AI. Life sciences reflects the historic strength of the chemical industry in Manchester and Cheshire - this took a blow from the move of AstraZeneca to Cambridge, but manufacturing remains in Macclesfield (One should remember that pharma itself is a high value manufacturing sector - I think much of the uptick in manufacturing GVA share in Denmark comes from Ozempic). As for professional and business services, I’m a strong believer in the Eoin O’Sullivan “Black box of manufacturing” theory, that increasing manufacturing share also creates increased demand for high value services like R&D, design and marketing.
This is all difficult and I’m not going to claim that success is guaranteed. But there is some genuine commitment from GM, and it absolutely fits into Burnham’s political priorities of bringing prosperity to the outlying towns of the conurbation.
Thank you, Richard. Very interesting as always. I value the AMRC very much and hope Atom Valley matures. My sense of urgency stems from looking at the severe drop in the capital stock for industrial equipment nationwide. While these projects are very worthwhile, a more ambitious programme of reindustrialisation will be needed. To be fair AB has time to articulate this.
I should have added that one of the UK's last machine tool factories is in Rochdale, PTG Holroyd (now, sadly, Chinese owned). I agree on the need for more capital stock, but I think the primary driver for that has to be demand, the promise of full order books. I wish we lived in a world where it wasn't necessary, but the urgent need for submarines and drones will be part of that, as is already happening.
I share your frustration on timescales. In 2014 when George Osborne came to the AMRC to launch the first devo deal, Keith Ridgway and I used our 15 minutes with him to try and persuade him to contract to buy a small modular reactor. I'm glad that things seem to be moving ahead with the Rolls SMR in Wylfa, but we could easily have got to this stage 5 years ago, if not before, if there'd been some political will.
I am now less sceptical than you about fusion, precisely because the STEP project takes it beyond a physics project to being an engineering project, with a clear target of building a plant, on an old coal-fired power station site near Scunthorpe, which can deliver 150 MW of power to the grid by 2040. As I wrote a few months ago, success isn't guaranteed, but the UK should do it anyway, because it will build a lot of new manufacturing and innovation capacity.
I will defer to you on fusion, but if it comes to fruition, the state of the industrial base likely means we have no chance of capitalising on the innovation.
On machine tools and demand, I get it. However, there is something very wrong with the gap in UK equipment vs another country like France, which has a similar-sized industrial base. The lack of machine tools itself deters investment and extends lead times. I think some creating some industrial slack is surely necessary. If we wait for the demand, the intermediate manufacturing sector is going to get worse, not better.
And of course correct on SMRs. Interestingly, the government in 2010 rejected a grant for Sheffield Forgemasters to buy a new forge press - 11 years later they have to buy the whole company.
Interesting post. As someone who had a ringside seat at Manchester’s deindustrialisation - my dad worked in the textile industry in the 1970s - I have a lot of sympathy for the underlying thesis but I think that you have to give modern Manchester credit for making the most of its strengths rather than trying to create a lost industrial past. I too would like to see manufacturing GDP rise but in the meantime we will need to rely on other sectors for badly needed growth.
I posted a similar comment on Steve Breckwold's article - It would be very interesting to see a comparison of Manchester with Birmingham and Leeds (inland, industrial growth driven, similar size).
The argument of some might be that Birmingham has held too much to manufacturing, but I think there are clearly other reasons for Birmingham's dysfunction.
I think the discourse is centred around the city centre. Manchester’s stats are quite a bit better than ‘Greater Manchester’, while central Birmingham is maybe held up by affluent peripheral areas.
Who are we kidding? Reindustrialization is a pipedream. Reindustrialization is a generational affair requiring steady policy support and investment for at least 25 years.
Western governments, never competent executors of policies that improve people's material circumstances (was the NHS the last?), have lost what little executive ability they had.
An interesting and timely question! I hope you don’t mind some reflections based on my experience at Manchester and Sheffield. In my five years at the University of Manchester, from 2020 until my retirement last September, I handled relations between the University, the city and the combined authority, and was quite closely involved in discussions about GMCAs economic strategy. I was an inaugural board member of the Atom Valley Mayoral Development Zone, and contributed to developing that strategy. Burnham was strongly committed to that project and stayed personally involved. While AB very much gave credit to Sir Howard Bernstein and Richard Leese for their part in the resurrection of Manchester’s city centre, his political priorities were moving towards spreading that economic success to the outlying boroughs - not least because his mandate was very much a whole GM vote. North East Greater Manchester - Rochdale, Bury and Oldham - have some of the weakest regional economies in England, with very low productivity and a whole host of other social issues; AB’s home turf of Wigan and Leigh is a little stronger, but not much.
If Manchesterism is anything, it is Richard Leese’s doctrine that there’s no point talking about wealth redistribution if there’s no wealth to distribute, so economic growth has to come first, and I think AB has internalised this. What Rochdale, Bury and Oldham need is more high productivity private sector businesses. Knowledge intensive business services work for central Manchester, but that’s a city centre, agglomeration story, hence the need to focus on manufacturing, and the motivation for the Atom Valley development.
How does one actually re-industrialise? My perspective on this is shaped by my time at Sheffield, where I saw the success of the University of Sheffield’s Advanced Manufacturing Research Centre (AMRC) in rejuvenating the manufacturing economies of Sheffield and Rotherham. The measure of that success is significant new inward investment in high value sectors - the Rolls-Royce turbine blade factory, the Boeing factory making aircraft components, the McLaren factory making composite sports-car components. We’re also seeing some of the more traditional firms expanding - Sheffield Forgemasters, now MoD owned, significantly expanding its facilities for forging components for submarines, Special Melted Products, now with Taiwanese investment to expand production of high value parts from speciality steels and other alloys.
AMRC did have a catalytic role in all this. It was founded as a collaboration between a university academic and a local SME making tools, who realised they needed to raise their game if they were going to be able to sell to primes like Boeing and Rolls-Royce. As someone interested in machine tools you will appreciate the fact that their original technology development was to optimise the process of machining titanium, increasing the throughput by more than an order of magnitude. It was this advance that Rolls-Royce cited in their decision to build a factory in NE England rather than Singapore.
AMRC works because it allows firms to test out new manufacturing technologies at industrial scale, using industrial machine tools. But we realised that innovation wasn’t enough, and to build an advanced manufacturing cluster you need skilled people, so an important part of the story was building an apprentice training centre. This has to operate at a high enough standard to have the trust of Rolls-Royce & Boeing, but it also is open to local engineering firms to use to, which I think has a significant effect on raising standards across the whole local manufacturing sector.
The AMRC experience was very much in our minds in planning the strategy for Atom Valley - helped by the fact that the major landowner in Atom Valley was Haworth Estates, who also owned the Rotherham Advance Manufacturing Park. Economic incentives matter, of course, so the argument that we have to use to convince them is that building a high value manufacturing cluster will bring them a bigger land value uplift than the default option of a logistics/warehousing park.
It seems to me that if you want to grow the high value manufacturing sector there are three possible routes, all of which should reinforce each other. You support the existing business base, both through helping them access innovation and skills, and through helping them find the right premises, with the right infrastructure, to expand into. Despite its overall weak economy, there are good manufacturing firms in Rochdale, Oldham and Bury. You can go into a Victorian weaving shed, and find a bunch of looms weaving advanced materials like Dyneema and carbon fibre into high value technical textiles; one of the UK’s few remaining semiconductor fabs is located in Oldham. You can attract international firms operating at the technological frontier, as Sheffield did with Boeing. Or you can support spin-outs and start-ups to grow in the UK (rather than seeing them disappear to Germany or Taiwan or California, as so often happens now).
So this is the plan for Atom Valley. It’s main selling point is that it is a very large and attractive development site, big enough for a gigafactory, with a commitment from local government to allow construction, supporting that with grid connections, road access, and building all the associated necessary infrastructure (including new housing and transport links). The University of Manchester is supporting that by running an innovation centre, focused on the translational research needed to support industry, in Rochdale, and we’ve built much closer links with the local FE colleges, to build the skills system that a more productive manufacturing economy will need.
As you observe, advanced materials and manufacturing isn’t the only sector prioritised in GM’s economic plans. Digital and AI already is a very strong sector for Manchester. The history of this is interesting, as it does hark back to the days of Cottonopolis - the rag trade produced catalogue selling, that turned into e-commerce, and from there to AI. Life sciences reflects the historic strength of the chemical industry in Manchester and Cheshire - this took a blow from the move of AstraZeneca to Cambridge, but manufacturing remains in Macclesfield (One should remember that pharma itself is a high value manufacturing sector - I think much of the uptick in manufacturing GVA share in Denmark comes from Ozempic). As for professional and business services, I’m a strong believer in the Eoin O’Sullivan “Black box of manufacturing” theory, that increasing manufacturing share also creates increased demand for high value services like R&D, design and marketing.
This is all difficult and I’m not going to claim that success is guaranteed. But there is some genuine commitment from GM, and it absolutely fits into Burnham’s political priorities of bringing prosperity to the outlying towns of the conurbation.
Thank you, Richard. Very interesting as always. I value the AMRC very much and hope Atom Valley matures. My sense of urgency stems from looking at the severe drop in the capital stock for industrial equipment nationwide. While these projects are very worthwhile, a more ambitious programme of reindustrialisation will be needed. To be fair AB has time to articulate this.
I should have added that one of the UK's last machine tool factories is in Rochdale, PTG Holroyd (now, sadly, Chinese owned). I agree on the need for more capital stock, but I think the primary driver for that has to be demand, the promise of full order books. I wish we lived in a world where it wasn't necessary, but the urgent need for submarines and drones will be part of that, as is already happening.
I share your frustration on timescales. In 2014 when George Osborne came to the AMRC to launch the first devo deal, Keith Ridgway and I used our 15 minutes with him to try and persuade him to contract to buy a small modular reactor. I'm glad that things seem to be moving ahead with the Rolls SMR in Wylfa, but we could easily have got to this stage 5 years ago, if not before, if there'd been some political will.
I am now less sceptical than you about fusion, precisely because the STEP project takes it beyond a physics project to being an engineering project, with a clear target of building a plant, on an old coal-fired power station site near Scunthorpe, which can deliver 150 MW of power to the grid by 2040. As I wrote a few months ago, success isn't guaranteed, but the UK should do it anyway, because it will build a lot of new manufacturing and innovation capacity.
(Blogpost here: https://softmachines.org/?p=3229)
I will defer to you on fusion, but if it comes to fruition, the state of the industrial base likely means we have no chance of capitalising on the innovation.
On machine tools and demand, I get it. However, there is something very wrong with the gap in UK equipment vs another country like France, which has a similar-sized industrial base. The lack of machine tools itself deters investment and extends lead times. I think some creating some industrial slack is surely necessary. If we wait for the demand, the intermediate manufacturing sector is going to get worse, not better.
And of course correct on SMRs. Interestingly, the government in 2010 rejected a grant for Sheffield Forgemasters to buy a new forge press - 11 years later they have to buy the whole company.
Interesting post. As someone who had a ringside seat at Manchester’s deindustrialisation - my dad worked in the textile industry in the 1970s - I have a lot of sympathy for the underlying thesis but I think that you have to give modern Manchester credit for making the most of its strengths rather than trying to create a lost industrial past. I too would like to see manufacturing GDP rise but in the meantime we will need to rely on other sectors for badly needed growth.
I agree Manchester has done well, although the actual progress is more modest than is often claimed.
It doesn’t tell us much about how we’d try deindustrialization, which is a defined aim of Andy Burnham’s leadership push.
I posted a similar comment on Steve Breckwold's article - It would be very interesting to see a comparison of Manchester with Birmingham and Leeds (inland, industrial growth driven, similar size).
The argument of some might be that Birmingham has held too much to manufacturing, but I think there are clearly other reasons for Birmingham's dysfunction.
Yes, and Birmingham does still seem to perform relatively well in spite of said dysfunction.
I think the discourse is centred around the city centre. Manchester’s stats are quite a bit better than ‘Greater Manchester’, while central Birmingham is maybe held up by affluent peripheral areas.
Who are we kidding? Reindustrialization is a pipedream. Reindustrialization is a generational affair requiring steady policy support and investment for at least 25 years.
Western governments, never competent executors of policies that improve people's material circumstances (was the NHS the last?), have lost what little executive ability they had.
I think given how badly British governance has been on energy, trade, industrial policy, the manufacturing sector has held up well.
I agree. It has been almost heroic.