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.<\/p>\n
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 \u00a3500 billion over the decade, funded through a combination of public borrowing, private co-investment and the recycling of assets from existing public portfolios.<\/p>\n
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 \u2014 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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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 \u2014 the remote crofts, hill farms and island communities \u2014 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.<\/p>\n
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The housing element is perhaps the most politically sensitive. The government has set a target of 300,000 new homes per year, with a requirement that at least 40 per cent be built on brownfield land in existing urban areas. To achieve this, the plan streamlines the planning process for developments that meet new design and sustainability standards, while creating a network of publicly owned development corporations modelled on the success of the London Docklands and Salford Quays regenerations.<\/p>\n
Local authorities have broadly welcomed the strategy, though with the customary caveat that funding must actually arrive. The chair of the Local Government Association described the plan as “the most serious attempt at spatial rebalancing in a generation,” while cautioning that councils would need multi-year settlement guarantees to plan effectively. “We have been burned before by announcements that look magnificent in a press release and vanish in a spending review,” the chair noted.<\/p>\n
The private sector response has been cautiously enthusiastic. Major construction firms have reported a surge in tender enquiries, and several international infrastructure funds have signalled their intention to establish or expand UK operations. The Confederation of British Industry has called for the creation of a dedicated infrastructure delivery authority, independent of the Treasury’s annual spending cycle, to ensure that projects are not delayed by political changes.<\/p>\n
Critics, inevitably, have questioned the affordability. The Opposition has argued that the borrowing required to fund the plan will burden future taxpayers and crowd out private investment. The Institute for Fiscal Studies has noted that while the long-term economic returns are likely to be positive, the short-term fiscal impact will require difficult choices elsewhere in public spending.<\/p>\n
Burnham, for his part, has been characteristically blunt in response. “You can borrow to build a hospital, a railway, a wind farm,” he told a conference of regional mayors in Leeds. “What you cannot do is borrow your way out of a country where half the towns have been left to rot for thirty years. That requires action, and action is what this government intends to take.”<\/p>\n
For the residents of towns like Wigan, Grimsby, Merthyr Tydfil and Derry, the plan is more than a policy document. It is a signal that they have not been forgotten. Whether the cranes actually appear on their skylines within five years remains to be seen. But for the first time in a long while, the promise feels less like rhetoric and more like a plan.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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