Midlands Engine to be wound down

Midland Railway Engine

Author Ashley Dace Licence CC BY-SA 2.0  Source Wikimedia Commons

 

Jane Lambert

I described the Midlands Engine as "a set of initiatives that were announced by Philip Hammond MP, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, in The Midlands Engine Strategy on 9 March 2017."  Its aim was to stimulate growth in the East and West Midlands. A Midlands Engine Partnership was established and chaired by Sir John Peace. I first mentioned it in The Midlands Engine which I posted to NIPC East Midlands on 7 Dec 2015.

In a statement dated 17 March 2025, the Partnership announced that government funding would cease on 31 March 2025.  The statement continued:

"In the coming months, we will focus on supporting our talented staff, bringing key programmes to a close and working with partners to maintain the momentum we have built. We will continue collaborating across the region to ensure a smooth transition and to reinforce the Midlands’ critical role in the UK’s economic future."

Many of the Partnership's functions are performed by the West Midlands and East Midlands combined authorities (see "What We Do" on the West Midlands Combined Authority's website and "What We Do" on the East Midlands Combined County Authority website),

The Midlands Engine was the region's response to the Northern Powerhouse which was conceived by the Coalition Government "as a strategy to stimulate economic growth in the North of England by developing the principal cities of the North of England into a counterweight to London through improving transport links and investing heavily in science, technology, the arts and education."  No similar announcement appears to have been made by the Northern Powerhouse Partnership but the idea of integrating the metropolitan areas between Leeds and Liverpool into a counterweight to London was abandoned when its boundaries were extended to everything between the Trent and Humnber and the Scottish border.

Despite the Labour Party's historic links with the Midlands and North the present government's attention seems to be focused on the Oxford to Cambridge arc (see Peter Foster UK revives plan for Oxford-Cambridge Arc 27 Jan 2025 Financial Times).  Hardly a new development as can be seen from my article Partnering for Prosperity: A new deal for the Cambridge- Milton Keynes-Oxford Arc from 21 Nov 2017 NIPC East Midlands.

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