The UK government published its Industrial Strategy on 23 June 2025 (the "Strategy"). The Strategy outlines the government's ambition, through a 10-year plan, to "make the UK the best country to invest in anywhere in the world".
The Strategy builds on the government's Plan for Change (presented to Parliament by the Prime Minister on 5 December 2024), which established a number of milestones for what the government refers to as "mission-led government".
As the name suggests, this is a strategic paper. The details of the government's plans are set out in eight "Sector Plans" that sit behind the Strategy. We will be publishing commentary on each of the Sector Plans in separate blog posts in the near future, with the first – on the Clean Energy Industries Sector Plan – published alongside this overview. The sector plans are:
(1) Clean Energy Industries
(2) Advanced Manufacturing
(3) Creative Industries
(4) Digital and Technologies
(5) Professional and Business Services
(6) Financial Services
(7) Life Sciences
(8) Defence
The heart of the government's message in the Strategy is its desire to drive economic growth (a word used 279 times in the Strategy). Below we have highlighted a small selection of the tools the government views as being most effective to help it achieve this goal:
- Supporting "frontier industries" within the IS-8 sectors. The frontier industries are the specific industries within each sector with a Sector Plan that the government has identified as the most able to drive growth through investment. The Sector Plans explain how the government intends to support the frontier industries in the relevant sector.
- Removing planning barriers to facilitate and accelerate major infrastructure development, including through the Planning and Infrastructure Bill.
- Crowding in private investment through public investment. The Strategy details a number of public sector investment bodies that will be involved in this, including the British Business Bank, the National Wealth Fund and Great British Energy. Government indicates in the Strategy a willingness for the public sector to take risks that might not otherwise be taken by the private sector in order to stimulate investment, for example through the National Wealth Fund making equity investments.
- Providing longer-term certainty to investors on the UK's infrastructure needs. This ambition is also explored in the government's 10-Year Infrastructure Strategy. The 10-Year Infrastructure Strategy sets out in more detail than the Industrial Strategy the details of the government's plan to produce what it calls "spatial" tools that can be used to track and plan infrastructure so that "place-based decisions" can be made. Below a strategic level spatial plan overseen by the new National Infrastructure and Service Transformation Authority (NISTA), there will be sector-specific spatial plans for key sectors. The hope is that these tools will enable government to prioritise infrastructure that will make the greatest contributions to economic growth. The government has signalled its intention to focus on city regions and clusters where the IS-8 industries concentrate.
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