Place, devolution and industrial strategy: three key tests for labour

On 4 July 2024, the UK elected the first Labour Government for fourteen years. On 30 October 2024, the new Labour Chancellor, Rachel Reeves, presented her first budget of the new administration, promising to restore economic stability and ‘begin a decade of national renewal’. Commentators quickly observed similarities in approach to that of the former 1997–2008 Labour Chancellor Gordon Brown. This paper considers the new government’s likely approach to levelling up (or reducing regional inequalities). It compares its economic framework to the Labour Government of 1997–2010 and subsequent Coalition and Conservative governments, to see what it might learn. We then consider some key tests for Labour for place, devolution and industrial strategy, which underpin Labour’s ambition to realise the economic potential of different areas within the UK. We argue that Labour must break from the neoclassical base that has dominated UK economic policymaking in its various related forms for the past 30 years. This base has enabled a largely space-neutral and conditional approach to subnational policy and has mitigated against the development of regional industrial policies.