Reindustrialising the North needs more than investment

There was plenty of talk at Cutlers’ Hall this week about the future of Northern industry. And rightly so.

The North has the engineering heritage, universities, manufacturing capability and increasingly the technology and investment needed to build some seriously ambitious businesses.

But there’s another part of that equation which perhaps gets talked about less. People.

A business can have a great product, investment behind it and a genuine opportunity to scale. At some point, though, somebody still has to build the team capable of doing it.

That might be the engineer who turns an idea into something that can actually be manufactured. The operations leader who takes a business from one site to three. The commercial hire who opens a new market. Or the senior leadership team and board capable of making the right decisions as the stakes get higher.

That is one of the reasons Shillito Group chose to support The Digital Forge this year.

We spend most of our working lives speaking to engineering, manufacturing and technology businesses across the region. We see the ambition that exists here, but we also see first-hand how often the availability of the right people determines how quickly that ambition can become reality.

Thursday’s Reindustrialising the North event, hosted by The Digital Forge CIC at Cutlers’ Hall, brought together people from across Northern industry to discuss that bigger opportunity: how we create, scale and keep ambitious industrial businesses here.

“Perhaps we should spend less time asking what Britain can do for the North and more time asking what the North can do for Britain.” — Master Cutler

“A great evening and some really interesting conversations about where Northern industry goes next. There’s clearly no shortage of ambition here — the challenge is making sure businesses have the investment, support and people they need to turn it into growth.” — Pete Shillito

There will never be one answer to how the North creates and keeps more globally significant industrial businesses.

Investment matters. Technology matters. Infrastructure matters. But talent matters too.

And if we genuinely want more Northern businesses to start here, scale here and stay here, making sure they can find the people capable of taking them through each stage of that journey has to be part of the conversation.

That’s a conversation we’re very happy to be part of.