More than 90 backbench Labour MPs have warned Prime Minister Andy Burnham that his pledge to reindustrialise Britain will fail unless it is driven decisively from his Manchester outpost, No 10 North, according to a briefing paper seen by The Guardian. The group argues that decades of deindustrialisation and deregulation have left the government without the detailed understanding of industry needed to make such a plan work.
“The state has lost capacity and has acquired a worrying set of behaviours which will inhibit reindustrialisation. The state has become less knowledgable about the state of the economy and our businesses, unable to comprehensively plan and slow to make decisions,” the briefing paper says.
The MPs are calling on Burnham to pass a new Reindustrialisation Act, setting clear targets for creating jobs by rebuilding manufacturing capacity and holding ministers accountable. “If we do not plan for reindustrialisation, we cannot achieve it,” the group argues.
The paper urges that the job of overseeing reindustrialisation be given to First Secretary Louise Haigh and based at No 10 North, which Burnham established in July and which already has some responsibility for growth policy. It also proposes that the National Wealth Fund be transformed into a Reindustrialisation Development Corporation to provide capital for rebuilding UK industry.
Andy MacNae, MP for Rossendale and Darwen, who chairs the group, said: “I’ve got absolutely no doubt about Andy or John’s commitment to this, but there is a kind of inertia in government, within the civil service, within economic orthodoxy, that still says that growth policy is about cities – it’s about the places that are already doing well.” He said reindustrialisation must be about “delivering jobs to the places that need them most”, adding: “It’s about making things again, and it’s about making the things that give us national resilience in a turbulent world.”
Steve Yemm, MP for the former mining constituency of Mansfield, said: “Countries around the world are reindustrialising, yet too many in Whitehall still treat industrial policy as dangerous nostalgia. We need the prime minister’s full backing to challenge those outdated assumptions.”
Lorraine Beavers, MP for Blackpool North and Fleetwood, said she was enthusiastic about the promise of reindustrialisation for constituencies like hers but warned: “If I have learned anything since becoming an MP two years ago, it’s that Whitehall doesn’t fix a problem unless it is told to.”
John Healey, who will deliver his first budget on Wednesday, used his speech at Labour’s conference last month to promise a “new age of industrialisation”. In its industrial strategy, published while Keir Starmer was prime minister, Labour identified eight sectors ripe for growth, including advanced manufacturing, clean energy and defence.