The UK *Industrial Strategy* | Bryden Wood podcast \\Martin Wood, Adrian La Porta and Professor John Dyson
In June 2025, the UK government published its long-awaited 10-year industrial strategy. The document is ambitious in scope – covering electricity pricing, skills, exports, tax policy, and sector focus – and, as John Dyson notes at the outset, the simple act of committing to a 10-year horizon is itself valuable. Businesses and investors can begin to plan. Green shoots, as Martin Wood puts it, need a stable environment before they will grow.
Where’s the knitting:
In this episode of the Bryden Wood Podcast, Professor John Dyson, Technical Director Adrian La Porta, and Director Martin Wood examine the strategy with the particular lens of people who think seriously about industrialisation – and who see a significant gap between what the document promises and what delivering it would actually require.
What it gets right
John's assessment is genuinely positive on the fundamentals. The strategy selects sectors where the UK has real competitive strengths – pharmaceuticals, advanced manufacturing, clean energy – rather than attempting to compete across the board. And beneath the sector choices, there is a systems-level intelligence to the thinking: the document talks about networks, clusters, supply chains, and links rather than treating industrial growth as a set of individual levers to pull. That, John argues, is sophisticated – whether or not readers recognise it as such.
Adrian picks out construction as a particularly important element. The strategy identifies construction as a foundational industry, and with good reason: infrastructure is the enabler for everything else the strategy wants to achieve. But the document also implicitly acknowledges what anyone working in the sector already knows – that there is a significant capacity and capability problem in delivering infrastructure at the scale the strategy demands.
The industrialisation gap
John's central challenge to the document is precise: it is an industrial strategy, but not an industrialisation strategy. It identifies where the UK wants to go. It does not adequately address how the country gets there – and the how is the difficult part.
The distinction matters. Pointing resources at a sector does not change how that sector operates. The same structural problems that have constrained UK productivity for decades: siloed disciplines, poor integration between academia and industry, a funding gap at the critical point between invention and scale-up, do not resolve themselves because a government document names a target. Something has to change in how the pieces connect. And on that question, the strategy is largely silent.
Adrian illustrates the point with an example from Bryden Wood's Accelerate Laboratories event: scientists graduating from university who cannot operate automated lab equipment, and automation specialists who understand nothing of the underlying science. AI and advanced manufacturing require people who span both. The education system is not producing them. The strategy acknowledges the skills challenge but does not describe the structural change that would address it.
The investment environment
Martin's contribution to the episode is characteristically direct about a structural problem the strategy cannot easily fix: the UK investment environment is fundamentally different from the US, and not in a productive way.
In the US, the gap between intellectual invention and commercial scale-up is supported by a deep venture capital culture that is comfortable with risk at an early stage. In the UK, that gap is where ideas go to stall. The funding environment becomes more cautious precisely at the moment a promising technology needs confident investment to cross the divide from prototype to product. The strategy mentions the British Business Bank and various investment frameworks, but Martin's assessment is that these are insufficient to close a gap that is cultural as much as financial.
The German model offers a different comparison. German Mittelstand companies tend to retain and develop innovations within the firm rather than building to sell. The Anglo-Saxon instinct (and particularly the UK variant) is to build for acquisition, with a US buyer as the assumed exit. That is not inherently wrong, Martin notes, but it does mean that the value of UK innovation frequently accrues elsewhere.
Clusters, connectivity, and the primate city problem
The strategy's emphasis on geographic clusters is well-founded: the academic evidence that clusters drive innovation is strong. But John and Martin both identify a familiar failure mode: the UK's tendency to create clusters and then silo them, setting them in competition rather than building the connective tissue between them.
This is compounded by what Martin describes as the UK's primate city problem. Investment, talent, and infrastructure gravitate towards London to a degree that is unusual among comparable economies. Germany's federal model distributes investment more evenly across cities of roughly similar weight. The UK does not have that structure, and the strategy's commitment to English devolution, more mayors, more regional identity, is at best a partial and long-term response. Andy Burnham's effectiveness as a spokesman for Manchester is cited as evidence that regional identity can be built, but building it across the country simultaneously while also creating a functioning network of connected clusters is, Martin concedes, probably too much to ask at once.
What the document is missing
Three things, in the view of all three speakers.
First, a vision. The strategy is verbose and detailed, but it lacks the single animating image of what the UK could be, the carrot, as John puts it, rather than the implicit suggestion that the country needs to pull its socks up. GDP per capita is proposed as a compelling single measure: it is something everyone can understand, it connects directly to the public services people care about, and it provides a clear north star for the integration the strategy is trying to achieve.
Second, integration as an explicit goal rather than an assumed outcome. Commerce, education, and investment are three spotlights that need to converge on the same point. At the moment they are misaligned. Government can encourage that convergence, but it cannot mandate it. The harder work – building the networks, the cross-disciplinary education, the funding models that bridge invention to scale – requires all three sectors to move together.
Third, the community and workforce dimension. A strategy that reads as top-down risks delivering the policy objectives without addressing the deeper political driver: the dissatisfaction in regions that have felt left behind by decades of London-centric growth. Whether the economic output of the strategy's sector priorities delivers social benefit to those regions, or flows primarily to investors and institutions, is a question the document does not resolve – and one that, as Adrian notes, may need a separate conversation.
Professor John Dyson is a consultant at Bryden Wood and co-author of Bryden Wood's Design to Value methodology. Adrian La Porta is Technical Director at Bryden Wood. Martin Wood is co-founder and Board Director.
