Time for focused choices to enable region to flourish: Gareth Scargill
Yorkshire has a habit of underselling itself. It’s a region with world-class innovation assets, a collaborative culture that rivals that of any other region in the UK, and a growing body of evidence with specialist clusters that can compete on the global stage.
And yet, too often, the conversation about Yorkshire’s economic future defaults to ambition without architecture. The potential is real, but the structural foundations to unlock it are not yet in place.
That gap between what Yorkshire could be, and what it currently is, largely comes down to a single question: are we willing to make focused choices?
The region’s competitive advantage lies in depth. Leeds ranks third in the UK for health tech funding, supported by a strong relationship between the University of Leeds, the NHS and Leeds Beckett University. Sheffield’s Advanced Manufacturing Park is another globally recognised asset that needs no qualification. These are world-class strengths that deserve world-class backing.
The risk, and it is a live one, is that political instincts push in the opposite direction. Investment spread thinly across a region to satisfy geographic fairness loses its power to create genuine impact. The government’s own Industrial Strategy points to specialisation for good reason: regions competing in the same sectors produce mediocrity rather than excellence. Yorkshire should be taking that signal seriously.
The Bilbao model offers a useful reference point that does not get enough attention in these conversations. Through targeted tax and relocation incentives, a northern Spanish city with no obvious geographic advantage positioned itself as one of Europe’s leading innovation destinations. The question worth asking of our own policymakers is straightforward: what is stopping us from building the same case for Leeds or Sheffield? Part of the answer lies in the tools available to regional leaders. Genuine devolution, the kind that includes meaningful tax-and-spend powers and allows local authorities to retain more of the business rates they generate, creates the conditions in which bold, focused investment decisions become possible. Without those levers, regional ambition is constrained by the pace and priorities of Westminster.
But devolution is a framework, not a strategy. The harder work is in the specifics. In Leeds, there is a critical shortage of the laboratory space that growing health tech businesses need: dry labs, wet labs, specialist facilities that do not exist at the scale required. Companies that reach that stage of growth are making relocation decisions now, not in some hypothetical future. Infrastructure investment that keeps those businesses here is urgent.
There is also a visibility problem. Yorkshire’s innovation ecosystem has the case studies, the research base and the investment story to attract serious capital. What it has sometimes lacked is the confidence to tell that story loudly enough and the structural mechanisms to consistently put the right businesses in front of the right investors. At Nexus, the Local Innovation Partnership Fund represents exactly the kind of focused, sector-specific model that can shift this: deliberate investment, aligned to genuine strengths, not a scattergun of small interventions.
By Gareth Scargill, Director, Nexus at the University of Leeds