When Andy Burnham stood at the dispatch box in the House of Commons earlier this year to unveil his government’s Modern Industrial Strategy, the phrase that stuck was not a slogan or a soundbite. It was a promise: “Every town in this country will see a crane on its skyline within five years.” It was the kind of plain-spoken, northern-inflected ambition that has defined Burnham’s political career, from his years as a junior health minister to his two terms as Mayor of Greater Manchester. Now, as Prime Minister, he is attempting to deliver on that promise at a national scale.
The centrepiece of the strategy is a ten-year infrastructure plan, the most comprehensive of its kind since the post-war reconstruction era. Published in full by the Treasury in late spring, the document runs to more than three hundred pages and commits the government to a rolling programme of investment in transport, energy, digital connectivity, housing and public buildings. The total envelope exceeds £500 billion over the decade, funded through a combination of public borrowing, private co-investment and the recycling of assets from existing public portfolios.
For communities outside the capital, the plan represents something close to a generational shift in thinking. For decades, infrastructure spending in the UK has been disproportionately concentrated in London and the South East. High Speed 2, whatever its merits, became a symbol of that imbalance — a project whose costs ballooned while its northern legs were quietly trimmed. Burnham’s plan explicitly reverses that logic. The first wave of funded projects includes a new trans-Pennine rail tunnel, the electrification of the Midland Main Line north of Leicester, and a comprehensive upgrade of port facilities in Teesside, Hull and Belfast.
Energy infrastructure features prominently. The government has confirmed the construction of four new small modular nuclear reactors, to be sited in Cumbria, Anglesey, Somerset and the Scottish Borders. Alongside these, a national grid reinforcement programme will lay thousands of miles of new high-voltage cabling to connect offshore wind farms in the North Sea and Celtic Sea to demand centres in the Midlands and the North. The ambition is to ensure that by 2035, no region of the UK is more than fifty miles from a major renewable generation site.
Digital connectivity is the third pillar. The plan commits to full-fibre broadband coverage for 99 per cent of premises by 2030, with the final one per cent — the remote crofts, hill farms and island communities — served by a subsidised satellite and fixed-wireless programme. Mobile coverage gaps along rural roads and railway lines are to be eliminated through a joint venture between the Treasury and the four major network operators.
