Business Secretary sets out plan for new industrial economy

Well, good morning. Great to get a chance to be introduced there. Thanks, Richard.

Well, it’s lovely to be here with you. I don’t want to lose this lovely audience at the beginning, but I have talked up that the last time I was here was for the playoffs semi-final against my Sunderland team. So I don’t know, was anyone in the crowd that night? Basically, I’m sorry, but Coventry played a lot better. So it’s great to see Coventry now in the Premier League and I can say with complete authenticity as I believe the next game Coventry have is against Newcastle, I wish you all the best in the season.

So let me start properly by recognising the brilliant work of this Combined Authority and its ambitious plans for re-industrialisation and for growth. It is really inspiring to see so many local and national businesses here today backing the blueprint that’s been published. And my message from the Government is on our part, we could not be more supportive of your efforts.

As the Chancellor said last week at our Party Conference, we want to usher in a new age of industrialisation with good work, good jobs and good growth in every postcode. And I just want to be clear about what that means. When we talk about re-industrialisation friends, it’s not nostalgia. It’s not about turning back the clock, I don’t want to re-open the coal mines that my grandfather worked in.

It is also not about wishing away economic trends or some of the geopolitical competitive pressures that we face. But it is about using our Modern Industrial Strategy to secure the UK’s competitive advantage. It’s about ensuring that Britain is the place where good ideas can be scaled and produced, and where our world-leading manufacturers can work hand in glove with our world-leading scientists and innovators, ending a story that we will all have heard too many times of brilliant British innovation, sometimes being commercialised and scaled up in other countries.

And it’s fitting that after the summit, Richard and I will be going to Horiba Mira, where I formally launched the Industrial Strategy last June. It’s not a coincidence that it was launched there, because they and the West Midlands more broadly are bursting with potential and opportunity.

And that’s why we’re putting real power in Richard’s hands to help unlock it. Through the Mayoral Revolving Growth Fund, we are providing half a million pounds of devolved recyclable capital across six regions. I know what you’re thinking, it sounds like when we called it that we’re recycling the mayors, not the capital, but just to be absolutely clear, it’s the money that does that.

And through the Transport First City Region funding, we’re supporting a host of road and rail improvements, including the Metro extension, linking Birmingham city centre to the new sports quarter, a project I’ve taken a close interest in because it is so exciting. And in the skills and education space, in consultation with the Combined Authority, the Government has been rolling out new technical excellence colleges and I’m very pleased that the Metropolitan College and the City of Wolverhampton College will be the first of these new centres of excellence for the West Midlands.

So this is what the future holds. Central Government, working in genuine partnership with local Government, with our metro mayors, with employers and with trade unions to build our new industrial economy. And of course, where we need to act decisively at a national level, we absolutely will.

We’ve shown that with our energy Supercharger and the British Industrial Competitiveness Scheme, which opened for applications earlier this month.

Combined, these schemes will save manufacturers here in the Midlands and across the UK hundreds of millions of pounds, tackling what I believe to be the number one issue in this agenda, which is our uncompetitive industrial energy prices.

Now we’ve also shown it in the six successful trade deals we’ve secured with powerhouse economies around the world, boosting exports for this region’s manufacturers big and small, and this includes India’s liberalisation of its auto sector with tariffs dropping from well over 100% to just 10%.

And this alone could be worth over £1bn to UK industry. But where a decision can be taken closer to the people it affects, that’s where it will be taken. And that is a central tenet of the Prime Minister’s pledge to take power out of Westminster and put it directly in the hands of people who know their local economies best.

We are throwing our full support behind the announcements made today by the West Midlands Combined Authority and they include, as Richard has said, a significant extension to the Business Energy Advice Service helping thousands of local businesses to reduce their energy costs and improve their productivity.

It includes a new West Midlands Talent Transition Pilot to retain valuable skills within the regional economy and a new Government-backed battery manufacturing task force. And crucially they include up to £50 million worth of funding to support innovation in the automotive supply chain.

The car industry has been the backbone of the economy here for generations and working with the Mayor, I know that it will continue to do that for many generations to come.

The funding allocation announced today is devolved from our Drive 35 programme, part of our long-term national industrial policy for the automotive sector. It’s a perfect example of central Government empowering local Government to support growth and re-industrialisation. As EVs become the predominant automotive technology, much of the wider supply chain will need to adapt fast to enable that.

And that’s why we’re helping firms invest in automation, in retooling and other improvements while providing dedicated capital support for critical EV technologies. In the case of Long, it will help this cutting-edge company bring a new generation of British-built sports cars to market.

And I, for one, am looking forward to getting behind the wheel of these vehicles later today. Richard and I work very closely together, but on this occasion, I think we might have a race in these cars, and that’s pretty exciting. So friends, this is what we mean by the re-industrialisation of the UK, with the renewal of proud industrial communities, the northeast of England, which provided the coal that powered our industrial revolution, generating the clean, green energy our economy needs.

In the southwest,  in Cornwall, once mined by pick and shovel, is now the home of a pretty edge and growing a critical minerals sector capable of producing the lithium that our electric vehicles here need. And right here in the West Midlands, a region with such a proud industrial and automotive heritage, new fully electric models designed for business going up against the best in the world. And that includes, of course, the brand-new Jaguar Type 1 unveiled in New York this week, the most advanced, powerful Jaguar the company has ever produced. And it will be built just down the road in Solihull alongside the new electric range.

I am very proud of the support my department has given to JLR in developing their cutting-edge technologies, such as the advanced software defined vehicles. And I believe that company has a very bright future in the West Midlands and indeed in the UK. So friends, my message to you today is this: This Prime Minister has shown that we are determined to undertake the biggest transfer of power out of Whitehall in a generation.

We are serious about re-industrialising our nation with high-paid, high-skilled jobs in our tradable sectors. And working with Richard, with the businesses and trade unions in this room, we will place the West Midlands at the forefront of this new industrial age.

The simple truth is in my department when it comes to working with Richard and with the West Midlands, we know we have here a partner who can deliver. We know you get results here and it is incredibly exciting to think about what we’ll do together in the months and years to come. Thank you so much.