The Advanced Manufacturing Research Centre (AMRC) in South Yorkshire has been a beacon of innovation, here’s what Britain needs for the reindustrialisation of tomorrow - Keith Ridgway
Andy Burnham walked into Downing Street in July on a promise that the places Westminster left behind for four decades would lead Britain’s economic renewal. His route is place-based reindustrialisation: building on the manufacturing strengths of our towns and cities, and growing home-grown start-ups into companies of scale.
Few places have more riding on that promise than Yorkshire. And one of the best tools for keeping it is about to be renewed on autopilot.
The Catapult network, the nine national centres that help companies turn research into products, is funded through a five-year, £1.6bn settlement with Innovate UK that runs to March 2028. The business case for the next settlement is due next summer, in step with the Spending Review. That makes the coming months the last window to design something different. Miss it, and the network rolls over into another like-for-like renewal: a system built for the challenges of 2011, not those of the 2030s.
Some will say regional renewal on the scale the Prime Minister promises is impossible. South Yorkshire knows otherwise.
A quarter of a century ago, the precision engineering entrepreneur Adrian Allen and I co-founded the Advanced Manufacturing Research Centre (AMRC) with Boeing, then the world’s biggest aerospace company. We built it at Orgreave. Stony ground on which to grow a cluster of global manufacturing talent. Yet, at Labour’s conference the Chancellor, John Healey, a South Yorkshire MP who has watched it grow from the start, described the area as “one of the most concentrated areas of innovation anywhere in Britain”.
Our approach, which Andy Haldane dubbed the “Orgreave model" in The Yorkshire Post, became the template for the Catapult network, one of the more imaginative pieces of British industrial policy of the past two decades. Fifteen years on, both the routes to innovation and the network itself have changed beyond recognition.
When the AMRC opened, the big push in aerospace was to machine large, monolithic parts from solid aluminium plate rather than assemble them from many smaller pieces. It made sense to buy those machines, often in partnership with suppliers, to develop techniques that made them faster, more accurate and productive.
That is no longer the problem. Today’s barriers are about data: collecting it from the factory floor, analysing it, and putting artificial intelligence and machine learning to work on it. We no longer need cathedral-sized halls full of machine tools to prove a point. We can build a digital twin of a process, fit sensors to the equipment a company already owns, and connect, analyse and improve it as it runs.
For a family-owned machine shop in Barnsley or a fabricator in Bradford, that is the help that matters now. Not a demonstration on a multimillion-pound machine they will never buy, but an engineer who can help them get value from the data their own equipment is already producing.
The Catapult of tomorrow will be knowledge-intensive and asset-light.
To achieve that, today’s Catapult needs rewiring. This is a moment for boldness. The Prime Minister should establish a small reindustrialisation taskforce with manufacturers in the lead, working alongside mayors, and with universities as Research & Development delivery partners. Its remit should cover the whole network, not just one centre: mapping where capability is genuinely national and where it is duplicated, and testing the case for a single governing organisation.
That case is strong. The network should be consolidated into one national body, with local industry charting the technology road maps that play to the strengths of each regional cluster. Yorkshire would be a natural place to start: advanced metals, nuclear and defence in South Yorkshire; offshore wind and clean energy on the Humber; digital health and medical technology in Leeds.
A rewired network would be leaner, with regional engines accelerating their strongest industrial innovators while helping others raise their game. In effect, we would finally adopt the Fraunhofer model that inspired the Catapults in the beginning.
The goal is not centralisation. It is to let regions capture and grow their own capabilities in partnership with the government. Members of the rewired network should be independent of university ownership and control, as Hauser and Parliament originally intended, and accountable both to their regions and to the nation.
Centres should compete as well as collaborate, judged against demanding regional measures that show how they grow the local economy rather than how busy they are: start-ups and frontier companies scaled, private investment attracted, productivity improved, exports and high-value jobs created, and strategically important supply-chain capability kept and expanded here rather than lost overseas.
Rewiring is not an admission of failure. It is a recognition that a system built for one generation of technology must evolve to exploit the next. Yorkshire showed Britain how to build the first version. The Yorkshire Post bravely supported our vision. We should now write the next chapter. But the book closes next summer.
Professor Keith Ridgway CBE FRS FREng is co-founder of the Advanced Manufacturing Research Centre.