Businesses urge ministers to give them clarity on post-brexit industrial strategy

INDUSTRY is calling for clarity from the Government over the nascent industrial strategy or risk one of the key planks of Conservative policy failing.

Britain’s manufacturers are calling for guidance on what ministers are looking for from business, areas they are interested in backing, and details of the support likely to be on offer, so they can feed into setting “sector deals”.

These deals were set out in an initial Green Paper, encouraging industry to come together and say what it wanted from the strategy, rather than the Government selecting sectors itself. The policy of the state “picking winners” has been roundly criticised as having been tried in the past and failing.

By encouraging business to help set priorities and targets itself, it is hoped that the Government’s policy will be more likely to succeed and will target areas of industry where the UK has potential to be a world leader. However, business says government has failed to give any information on what it wants.

Companies and trade associations responded to previous consultations from the Government about what they would like to see in the strategy, but have failed to receive any response from ministers.

Chris Richards, head of business environment policy at EEF, the manufacturing body, said: “Sector deals have great potential to boost industry but the Government’s Green Paper left urgent questions unanswered.”

He added: “Sectors don’t know what criteria the Government will be using to sift bids or what the timescale is – they don’t even know the email address of who to send their bids to. This is not like when local authorities were able to use their sizeable resources to send detailed devolution deal bids.”