Brandon To is a Politics graduate from UCL and a Hong Kong BN(O) immigrant settled in Harrow.
Britain has become obsessed with one economic question: how do we generate growth?
Conservatives said levelling up. Keir Starmer said ‘change‘. Andy Burnham… said, “Please give me more power, or the bus gets it”. Yet we rarely ask a more fundamental one: where should that growth come from?
In his recent Conhome article, Sir Mel Stride is right to argue that Conservatives must once again become the party of economic growth. Lower taxes, cheaper energy, regulatory reform and backing enterprise are all necessary conditions for a more dynamic economy. But conditions alone do not determine where prosperity is created. Unless we answer that second question, Britain risks becoming an economy that grows ever richer in one corner while leaving the rest of the country behind.
Today, Britain is one of the most geographically imbalanced economies in the developed world.
London alone now accounts for almost a quarter of the UK’s economic output and generates around £69,000 of GDP per person, compared with a national average of around £39,000. London and the South East are the only regions to record a net fiscal surplus; every other part of the country relies, to varying degrees, on transfers from elsewhere. Meanwhile, manufacturing has fallen from around 16 per cent of GDP in 1990 to roughly 8 per cent today, as services have come to dominate four-fifths of the economy.
To London, this is a grand success story. To elsewhere, it’s demise and despair.
So what’s wrong with our rural economy? I’d argue it’s a problem with value chains, or “productive ecosystems”.
We know this logic very well in the service sector, where economic activities are never divided into neat, isolated compartments. Instead, they form a mutually complementary web: consulting firms provide strategic guidance, PR agencies host events to establish a brand, corporate banks create wealth, and accountants track and record it. Every player feeds into the next, building a highly efficient ecosystem. Yet, the moment we look outside the service sector and into rural Britain, we seem to lose the ability to think in these interconnected terms.
Take agriculture. Earlier this year, I argued that Conservatives must offer rural Britain more than subsidies; we must make it a productive investment environment again. But farming itself is only one part of a much larger picture. A litre of milk does not create lasting prosperity on its own. Processing plants, packaging businesses, engineering firms, logistics companies, research centres and exporters create far more value.
Today, Britain often produces the raw material but captures too little of the value that follows. We produced record volumes of milk last year and exported more dairy products by volume than we imported. Yet we still ran a dairy trade deficit of more than £1.5 billion because we continue to import high-value products such as cheese and yoghurt while exporting lower-value bulk commodities. We harvest timber, yet remain one of the world’s largest importers of higher-value engineered wood products.
Too many British value chains are broken.
Other countries have approached this differently. The Netherlands has become the world’s second-largest agricultural exporter not because it has more farmland than Britain, but because it has built an entire ecosystem around agricultural innovation, processing, logistics and exports. Germany’s famous Mittelstadt is sustained not only by skilled manufacturers but also by the cooperation of local banks, technical education, and patient capital that grow alongside local businesses. These countries cultivate places and ecosystems where businesses can succeed together.
Britain already has examples of this approach.
The Sheffield Advanced Manufacturing Research Centre has transformed a former colliery into a world-class advanced manufacturing cluster, attracting companies including Boeing and Rolls-Royce while training thousands of apprentices. Greater Manchester’s Bee Network offers another lesson. Whatever one thinks of Andy Burnham’s broader politics, Conservatives should be willing to recognise a practical success. Better integrated transport is not valuable because buses are inherently exciting; it is valuable because it expands labour markets, connects people with jobs and makes investment more attractive.
This, I believe, is the next stage of Conservative economic thinking.
Instead of trying to outbid Labour with subsidies or copying America’s massive state-spending sprees, Conservatives should focus on rebuilding these supply chains from the ground up. We need to lay the foundations that actually allow local economies to grow on their own.
That starts with infrastructure built around real economic activity, not arbitrary council boundaries. We also need to unlock capital, making it much easier for long-term investments, like ISA funds, to back local small businesses. Next, we should expand successful public-private research hubs and fix technical education, shifting the focus away from generic university degrees and toward practical apprenticeships that fill real job shortages.
Finally, we need to stop forcing every region to chase the same industries. Instead, let’s help different counties figure out what they are actually good at and build on those strengths.
In short, Britain needs a strategy for becoming productive again.
Sir Mel has rightly begun talking about growth. Our next challenge is to ensure that growth is rooted not only in the City of London, but in every county, market town and industrial community with the potential to create wealth once more.
Ultimately, Britain’s economic future will not be secured by fine-tuning the tax codes of consulting firms or hoping a tech startup in Shoreditch solves regional inequality. It will be secured when a farmer in Yorkshire isn’t just shipping off raw milk, but capturing the real wealth that comes with it with his community.