Ten-year plan to boost county's international growth

The Lancashire Enterprise Partnership has published a ten-year plan designed to boost the red rose county's economy by improving engagement with international markets.

The Lancashire Internationalisation Strategy focuses on boosting five areas: exports, foreign direct investment (FDI), capital investments, innovation, and the visitor economy.

The underpinning belief is that locally-owned exporters tend to be more resilient businesses and foreign-owned companies in the county are often more productive and pay higher wages.

The full 88-page strategy, and separate 20-page executive summary, detail how Lancashire can significantly grow its economy through a more proactive, targeted and integrated approach to international markets, and by promoting dynamic investment opportunities to global investors.

Among the key recommendations are that Lancashire promotes itself globally as a high-tech, multi-disciplinary and innovation-based testbed. This is based on the county’s proliferation of world-class university R&D assets and industry-led centres of excellence, many of which are directly aligned to the needs of several fast-growth sectors.

Examples cited include cyberspace and telecoms, sustainable construction, green energy and cleantech, drones and future flight, 5G and private networks, digital health and medtech, agritech, and decarbonised transport.

The report's five key areas of interest - described as the 'pillars' of the strategy - have been used to benchmark and assess how the county’s existing and emerging sector strengths, key assets and resources relate to current global trends and anticipated international demand.

This analysis has then informed a suite of short, medium and long-term actions which are designed to make Lancashire’s economy more globally active, internationally competitive, and generate more overseas investment.

Many of the opportunities highlighted are directly linked to Lancashire’s core industrial sectors. These include aerospace and advanced manufacturing, energy and low carbon technologies, food production, tourism, and the digital industries. In addition, the strategy identifies global growth potential in a range of emerging markets, such as cybersecurity and defence, future mobility, and health Innovation.

For each key sector, and for each of the five pillars, there is extensive qualitative and quantitative evidence which underpins the report’s strategic recommendations. This includes the results of extensive consultations with Lancashire business owners and other stakeholder, global market intelligence, competitor analysis, and trend modelling, which is pertinent to the Lancashire economy.

The strategy then sets out a series of sector-specific baselines, recommended tactics to increase international engagement, and potential growth projections.

Debbie Francis, chair of the LEP said: “This document is the first deep dive we’ve done into Lancashire’s global economic capacity and capabilities for many years. But as well as a thorough assessment of where the county is now, both in a post-Covid and post-Brexit context, what’s really exciting is the roadmap it sets out for Lancashire’s future internationally.

“That includes the international opportunities being driven by both our traditional industrial strengths and through numerous emerging markets, together with our growing cluster of word-class R&D assets and in-demand, cross-cutting technology specialisms.

“When you also consider that UK businesses who export tend to thrive far more than those who don’t, and foreign companies who locate here are generally more productive, more innovative, and pay higher wages, you can see how becoming more globally engaged could help us rapidly scale-up many sections of Lancashire’s economy."