Reindustrialisation: what Burnham means and what the programme does

Burnham's words

What reindustrialisation means

Reindustrialisation means rebuilding the ability of places to make, power, move, repair, design and export things. It is not only factories. It is productive capacity: advanced materials, low carbon energy, life sciences, digital systems, creative production, construction, transport engineering and the supply chains around them.

The central point is place. Deindustrialisation did not just remove jobs. It removed ladders. Towns lost routes from school to skilled work, local firms lost customers, high streets lost spending power, and the state ended up paying for failure through benefits, temporary accommodation, poor health and low productivity.

The five cluster model

Greater Manchester's local version is built around five growth clusters. The programme takes the same logic national: find existing strengths, connect them to housing, energy, transport and skills, then back them for a decade rather than announcing a new slogan every spending review.

How the programme addresses it

• Infrastructure: HS2 completion, Northern Powerhouse Rail and the Northern Olympics timetable make industrial geography real. Firms invest when they can move people, materials and ideas reliably.
• Energy: grid expansion, SMRs, offshore wind and public control of strategic energy infrastructure lower the cost base for households and manufacturers.
• Public control of essentials: water, rail, buses and grid transmission are treated as national productive infrastructure, not rent extraction platforms.
• Skills: the 16 to 22 integrated education model creates equal status between academic and technical routes, with degree apprenticeships and vocational years connected to local employers.
• Work: the full time hiring credit and sectoral employer NI cut support real jobs in care, construction, hospitality, skilled trades and early years, while the displacement levy stops automation becoming a one way transfer from workers to shareholders.
• Housing: 500,000 social homes mean workers can live near the clusters that need them. Industrial strategy fails when the workforce cannot afford the place.
• Finance: infrastructure bonds, a twelve year budget and land value capture give local areas investment tools beyond annual Treasury permission.
• Devolution: a Senate of Regions and civil service dispersal move decision making closer to the places being rebuilt.

The difference from levelling up

Levelling up was mostly grant competition. Places wrote bids, Whitehall judged them, and ministers announced pots of money. Reindustrialisation is different. It asks what a place can produce, what infrastructure it lacks, what skills its young people need, and what institutions will still be there in ten years.

The programme's answer is not a fund with a logo. It is a state that builds the platform: transport, energy, housing, skills, procurement, finance and public control of basic systems. Once that platform exists, private investment has somewhere to go.

The test

The test of reindustrialisation is not whether a minister can name a sector. It is whether a young person in Makerfield can see a route from school to skilled work without leaving home, whether a firm in Oldham can afford energy and premises, whether a town centre has jobs as well as flats, and whether Britain can make more of the things it needs.

Burnham's argument is that deindustrialisation was not an accident of nature. It was a political choice compounded by privatisation, austerity and overcentralisation. The programme answers with the opposite choice: rebuild productive capacity, spread ownership of opportunity, and make the North a centre of national growth rather than a place invited to bid for consolation money.