Thomas Griffin is the Global Ambassador for the Conservative Policy Forum and the Zurich Representative for Conservatives Abroad.
Rotterdam built Europe’s greatest industrial complex without oil, without gas, and without the state choosing a single national champion.
Britain possesses some of the world’s most valuable industrial and scientific clusters: in life sciences, financial technology, aerospace, and creative industries and yet we keep finding ways to prevent them from compounding.
The problem is not ideas, capital or talent. It is our failure to identify the barriers the state places in front of our best assets and our failure to find the political courage to bulldoze them. That is the oldest Conservative instinct of all: clear the field and let the best win.
Drive west out of Rotterdam toward the North Sea and the city gives way to something that feels less like a port than a parallel industrial civilisation. Chemical plants, refineries, storage terminals, pipelines, rail freight, hydrogen infrastructure, and logistics corridors stretch across reclaimed land built decade after decade by deliberate national commitment.
The waste product of one facility becomes the feedstock of another. Industrial symbiosis compounds on itself. It supports 385,000 jobs. By 2030 it will merge with Antwerp to form the largest industrial zone in European history.
The Netherlands has no oil. It has no gas of strategic consequence.
What it had was the mouth of the Rhine and the sustained willingness to build around it. The Dutch state did not achieve this through spending sprees or picking corporate winners. It did something more disciplined.
In 1988 the Dutch government formally abandoned the dispersal of economic growth in favour of concentration, designating Rotterdam a ‘Mainport’, a political commitment backed by state ownership and national spatial plans that sent a single clear signal to private capital: this location is a permanent national priority. What followed was forty years of physical investment that made the commitment real. Shipping channels were deepened. Europoort was built in the 1960s, Maasvlakte in the 1980s, and when that filled, Maasvlakte 2 (1,000 hectares reclaimed from the North Sea) was completed in 2013.
The government owned the land, leased it long-term, coordinated energy, transport, and logistics under a single unshakeable ruleset, and left commercial competition entirely to the market. Rotterdam demonstrates a third approach: the state as builder of conditions rather than allocator of outcomes. The cluster emerged because private firms concluded that Rotterdam’s regulatory and physical foundations made it the optimal place to risk their own capital. Once sufficient scale accumulated, self-reinforcing network effects took over. This is not the state picking winners. It is the state creating the conditions in which winners emerge.
Britain has been promising the equivalent for the Oxford-Cambridge Arc since 2017. It has not yet managed it.
And yet, Britain once understood this instinctively. Think of Thatcher’s Big Bang reforms. Her government identified that London had a world-class concentration of financial talent, legal institutions, global relationships, and linguistic reach, and that a thicket of self-imposed rules was preventing those assets from competing. It removed the rules and stepped back. Within a decade London was Europe’s unrivalled financial capital and it remains so nearly forty years on. Thatcher did not choose which banks would win. She removed what was stopping them competing. Rotterdam and the City reflect the same underlying growth philosophy: identify what is suppressing a productive cluster, remove the legal and structural constraints decisively, and let the market build.
The Rotterdam planning philosophy has been applied in Britain, on a trading estate in Berkshire, with results that should embarrass every government that has since failed to replicate it more widely. In 1995, Slough Borough Council and SEGRO created a Simplified Planning Zone (SPZ) for Slough Trading Estate, a pre-approved development framework combined with long-term infrastructure planning that cut approval times from years to weeks. When hyperscale cloud computing accelerated in the 2010s, Slough was perfectly positioned. Firms invested because political and regulatory uncertainty had been radically reduced. The estate now supports 14,000 jobs and generates over £30 million annually in local business rates. It is now Europe’s largest data centre cluster and the second largest digital hub globally.
Britain has accumulated a political economy fundamentally resistant to concentrated development, where compliance culture and judicial reviews trump delivery. There are precisely two operational Simplified Planning Zones in England. The instrument has existed in British planning law since 1971. SPZs remain exceptionally rare not because policymakers are unaware of them, or because Britain lacks statutory powers, but because SPZs strip away discretionary veto points. They shift systems from negotiated delay toward rules-based certainty. They require governments willing to establish a stable legal baseline and then step back, rather than using the planning system as a tool for endless political micromanagement.
Cambridge is ranked by WIPO as the world’s second most intensive innovation cluster per capita, above Greater Boston. The Golden Triangle of Oxford, Cambridge, and London attracts the lion’s share of European biotech venture capital. The NHS holds a cradle-to-grave anonymised population health dataset of fifty million people that is, in an age of AI-driven drug discovery, a strategic asset without parallel. These are not the assets of a nation in managed decline. They are the assets of a nation that has not yet decided to compete.
At the height of the laboratory space crunch in 2023, Cambridge faced more than a million square feet of unmet demand while available supply had effectively collapsed. Supply has since improved, but the structural constraint remains. By comparison, Greater Boston has more than 60 million square feet of laboratory space and millions more approved or under construction, built by private capital within conditions the state enabled. A serious growth cluster does not merely require planning approval. It requires electricity grid capacity, water infrastructure, transport links, housing supply, and long-duration institutional commitment. We are failing in that we have a rocket on the launchpad and instead we are arguing about the planning permission for the gantry.
The pricing regime atop these structural failures was the final indignity. The NHS drug revenue clawback reached approximately 23.5 per cent on newer medicines in 2025, against 5.7 per cent in France and 7 per cent in Germany. In September 2025 Merck cancelled a £1 billion London research centre already under construction. Days later AstraZeneca paused a planned £200 million Cambridge expansion, having already cancelled a £450 million vaccine investment earlier that year. Eli Lilly paused planned investment in a London biotech hub, while Sanofi had already shifted Cambridge research activity to Boston. Together, the decisions fuelled concerns that nearly £2 billion of planned life-sciences investment was being withdrawn, delayed or redirected away from the UK. Reform arrived in December 2025 as a condition of the UK-US trade deal, secured by Washington’s negotiators, not by British strategic clarity. A country that fixes its treatment of a crown jewel industry only when a foreign power insists is not serious about its own growth. And while the rate has fallen to 14.5 per cent in 2026, Britain is still more than twice as expensive as its principal European competitors.
So what’s going wrong?
The first misstep is Labour’s instinct to fund, to allocate, to attach ministerial judgment to outcomes. The Sector Plan commits hundreds of millions to specific programmes and services. The Mansion House reforms nudge pension capital in the right direction but leave the routing to ministerial preference rather than market signals. The result is a government that talks the language of Rotterdam but governs in the tradition of British Leyland. State money following state priorities rather than state foundations enabling private ones.
The second misstep is the dispersal instinct.
Labour is committed to spreading R&D investment across the UK before any single cluster has achieved critical mass. No country has ever levelled up successfully by weakening its frontier cluster. Levelling up is a desirable aim, but we must be realistic. Rotterdam did not distribute the European chemicals industry evenly across the Netherlands. It focused on fuelling an already successful investment that still had room to grow and that has benefitted the entire country. Concentrating scale in Cambridge is not an argument against the regions because ultimately the tax receipts, supply chain employment, and investable British companies that a globally dominant Cambridge cluster generates are what funds genuine investment elsewhere. Spreading the seed before the roots have taken is not levelling up. It is a way of ensuring that nowhere gets what it needs and allowing a government to call that fairness.
Cambridge already exists. The market has already rendered its verdict. Global capital continues trying to invest there despite Britain’s infrastructure bottlenecks, planning friction, and financing weaknesses. This is not a story about a nation that lacks the ingredients for greatness but a story about a nation that lets small fires die before they have become the bonfire to warm the whole nation.
A serious growth strategy would look less like another industrial strategy document and more like a ruthless deployment of state capacity to remove barriers around proven strengths. That means Simplified Planning Zones across the Arc’s leading science parks, university campuses, and innovation districts, backed by grid expansion, water infrastructure, housing delivery, and transport coordination. It means stable pricing and regulatory frameworks that do not require Washington to enforce them, and investor certainty durable enough to survive changes of government.
None of this requires ministers to act as venture capitalists or decide which companies succeed. It requires something simultaneously more ambitious and more difficult: a state that understands its primary duty is to build the unshakeable foundations within which private enterprise can flourish and sustain that commitment long enough for compounding to do its work.
Britain has done this at scale before, and Rotterdam and Slough demonstrate it still works. We must build the conditions, remove the barriers and finally let Britain grow.
Thomas Griffin is the Global Ambassador for the Conservative Policy Forum and the Zurich Representative for Conservatives Abroad.
Rotterdam built Europe’s greatest industrial complex without oil, without gas, and without the state choosing a single national champion.
Britain possesses some of the world’s most valuable industrial and scientific clusters: in life sciences, financial technology, aerospace, and creative industries and yet we keep finding ways to prevent them from compounding.
The problem is not ideas, capital or talent. It is our failure to identify the barriers the state places in front of our best assets and our failure to find the political courage to bulldoze them. That is the oldest Conservative instinct of all: clear the field and let the best win.
Drive west out of Rotterdam toward the North Sea and the city gives way to something that feels less like a port than a parallel industrial civilisation. Chemical plants, refineries, storage terminals, pipelines, rail freight, hydrogen infrastructure, and logistics corridors stretch across reclaimed land built decade after decade by deliberate national commitment.
The waste product of one facility becomes the feedstock of another. Industrial symbiosis compounds on itself. It supports 385,000 jobs. By 2030 it will merge with Antwerp to form the largest industrial zone in European history.
The Netherlands has no oil. It has no gas of strategic consequence.
What it had was the mouth of the Rhine and the sustained willingness to build around it. The Dutch state did not achieve this through spending sprees or picking corporate winners. It did something more disciplined.
In 1988 the Dutch government formally abandoned the dispersal of economic growth in favour of concentration, designating Rotterdam a ‘Mainport’, a political commitment backed by state ownership and national spatial plans that sent a single clear signal to private capital: this location is a permanent national priority. What followed was forty years of physical investment that made the commitment real. Shipping channels were deepened. Europoort was built in the 1960s, Maasvlakte in the 1980s, and when that filled, Maasvlakte 2 (1,000 hectares reclaimed from the North Sea) was completed in 2013.
The government owned the land, leased it long-term, coordinated energy, transport, and logistics under a single unshakeable ruleset, and left commercial competition entirely to the market. Rotterdam demonstrates a third approach: the state as builder of conditions rather than allocator of outcomes. The cluster emerged because private firms concluded that Rotterdam’s regulatory and physical foundations made it the optimal place to risk their own capital. Once sufficient scale accumulated, self-reinforcing network effects took over. This is not the state picking winners. It is the state creating the conditions in which winners emerge.
Britain has been promising the equivalent for the Oxford-Cambridge Arc since 2017. It has not yet managed it.
And yet, Britain once understood this instinctively. Think of Thatcher’s Big Bang reforms. Her government identified that London had a world-class concentration of financial talent, legal institutions, global relationships, and linguistic reach, and that a thicket of self-imposed rules was preventing those assets from competing. It removed the rules and stepped back. Within a decade London was Europe’s unrivalled financial capital and it remains so nearly forty years on. Thatcher did not choose which banks would win. She removed what was stopping them competing. Rotterdam and the City reflect the same underlying growth philosophy: identify what is suppressing a productive cluster, remove the legal and structural constraints decisively, and let the market build.
The Rotterdam planning philosophy has been applied in Britain, on a trading estate in Berkshire, with results that should embarrass every government that has since failed to replicate it more widely. In 1995, Slough Borough Council and SEGRO created a Simplified Planning Zone (SPZ) for Slough Trading Estate, a pre-approved development framework combined with long-term infrastructure planning that cut approval times from years to weeks. When hyperscale cloud computing accelerated in the 2010s, Slough was perfectly positioned. Firms invested because political and regulatory uncertainty had been radically reduced. The estate now supports 14,000 jobs and generates over £30 million annually in local business rates. It is now Europe’s largest data centre cluster and the second largest digital hub globally.
Britain has accumulated a political economy fundamentally resistant to concentrated development, where compliance culture and judicial reviews trump delivery. There are precisely two operational Simplified Planning Zones in England. The instrument has existed in British planning law since 1971. SPZs remain exceptionally rare not because policymakers are unaware of them, or because Britain lacks statutory powers, but because SPZs strip away discretionary veto points. They shift systems from negotiated delay toward rules-based certainty. They require governments willing to establish a stable legal baseline and then step back, rather than using the planning system as a tool for endless political micromanagement.
Cambridge is ranked by WIPO as the world’s second most intensive innovation cluster per capita, above Greater Boston. The Golden Triangle of Oxford, Cambridge, and London attracts the lion’s share of European biotech venture capital. The NHS holds a cradle-to-grave anonymised population health dataset of fifty million people that is, in an age of AI-driven drug discovery, a strategic asset without parallel. These are not the assets of a nation in managed decline. They are the assets of a nation that has not yet decided to compete.
At the height of the laboratory space crunch in 2023, Cambridge faced more than a million square feet of unmet demand while available supply had effectively collapsed. Supply has since improved, but the structural constraint remains. By comparison, Greater Boston has more than 60 million square feet of laboratory space and millions more approved or under construction, built by private capital within conditions the state enabled. A serious growth cluster does not merely require planning approval. It requires electricity grid capacity, water infrastructure, transport links, housing supply, and long-duration institutional commitment. We are failing in that we have a rocket on the launchpad and instead we are arguing about the planning permission for the gantry.
The pricing regime atop these structural failures was the final indignity. The NHS drug revenue clawback reached approximately 23.5 per cent on newer medicines in 2025, against 5.7 per cent in France and 7 per cent in Germany. In September 2025 Merck cancelled a £1 billion London research centre already under construction. Days later AstraZeneca paused a planned £200 million Cambridge expansion, having already cancelled a £450 million vaccine investment earlier that year. Eli Lilly paused planned investment in a London biotech hub, while Sanofi had already shifted Cambridge research activity to Boston. Together, the decisions fuelled concerns that nearly £2 billion of planned life-sciences investment was being withdrawn, delayed or redirected away from the UK. Reform arrived in December 2025 as a condition of the UK-US trade deal, secured by Washington’s negotiators, not by British strategic clarity. A country that fixes its treatment of a crown jewel industry only when a foreign power insists is not serious about its own growth. And while the rate has fallen to 14.5 per cent in 2026, Britain is still more than twice as expensive as its principal European competitors.
So what’s going wrong?
The first misstep is Labour’s instinct to fund, to allocate, to attach ministerial judgment to outcomes. The Sector Plan commits hundreds of millions to specific programmes and services. The Mansion House reforms nudge pension capital in the right direction but leave the routing to ministerial preference rather than market signals. The result is a government that talks the language of Rotterdam but governs in the tradition of British Leyland. State money following state priorities rather than state foundations enabling private ones.
The second misstep is the dispersal instinct.
Labour is committed to spreading R&D investment across the UK before any single cluster has achieved critical mass. No country has ever levelled up successfully by weakening its frontier cluster. Levelling up is a desirable aim, but we must be realistic. Rotterdam did not distribute the European chemicals industry evenly across the Netherlands. It focused on fuelling an already successful investment that still had room to grow and that has benefitted the entire country. Concentrating scale in Cambridge is not an argument against the regions because ultimately the tax receipts, supply chain employment, and investable British companies that a globally dominant Cambridge cluster generates are what funds genuine investment elsewhere. Spreading the seed before the roots have taken is not levelling up. It is a way of ensuring that nowhere gets what it needs and allowing a government to call that fairness.
Cambridge already exists. The market has already rendered its verdict. Global capital continues trying to invest there despite Britain’s infrastructure bottlenecks, planning friction, and financing weaknesses. This is not a story about a nation that lacks the ingredients for greatness but a story about a nation that lets small fires die before they have become the bonfire to warm the whole nation.
A serious growth strategy would look less like another industrial strategy document and more like a ruthless deployment of state capacity to remove barriers around proven strengths. That means Simplified Planning Zones across the Arc’s leading science parks, university campuses, and innovation districts, backed by grid expansion, water infrastructure, housing delivery, and transport coordination. It means stable pricing and regulatory frameworks that do not require Washington to enforce them, and investor certainty durable enough to survive changes of government.
None of this requires ministers to act as venture capitalists or decide which companies succeed. It requires something simultaneously more ambitious and more difficult: a state that understands its primary duty is to build the unshakeable foundations within which private enterprise can flourish and sustain that commitment long enough for compounding to do its work.
Britain has done this at scale before, and Rotterdam and Slough demonstrate it still works. We must build the conditions, remove the barriers and finally let Britain grow.