The West Midlands Growth Plan 2025 is the most detailed and credible regional strategy in a decade, a £17.4 billion growth blueprint built on data, pragmatism, and belief in place-based delivery. It models a region that can finally close its £5-per-hour productivity gap and turn polycentric geography into economic strength. Yet it still risks the same fate as its predecessors: ambition without execution. My critique goes beyond the press releases, exposing funding silos, institutional churn, and the absence of practitioner leadership, and proposes a hard-edged, engineer’s roadmap for delivery. Cyber must be treated as infrastructure; innovation must be systemic, not decorative; and governance must have teeth. The call is simple: stop admiring the plan and start engineering the outcome. Continuity, accountability, and practitioner leadership; the rest is noise.

Contents

Introduction

The West Midlands Growth Plan 2025 arrives at a pivotal moment, not just for the region, but for the country. The UK is finally being forced to admit what the data have whispered for a decade: growth is anaemic, productivity stagnant, and regional inequality entrenched. The Midlands, the nation’s industrial heart, has been running uphill through headwinds not of its making: pandemic recovery, supply-chain shocks, inflation, and policy churn that would make even the most optimistic investor hesitate.

And yet, this plan matters. It’s the most detailed, data-rich regional strategy produced in the UK for years, 180 pages of analysis, vision, and intent. A promise to generate £17.4 billion in additional GVA, create 93,000 jobs, and close the productivity gap that keeps the region’s output per hour £5 below the national average. For once, this isn’t just rhetoric about “levelling up”. It’s a working document that acknowledges the Midlands’ realities and dares to propose a path forward.

But here’s the paradox: the plan is bold, coherent, and empirically grounded, yet it still risks the same old fate: “ambition without delivery”.

Report Summary and Findings

The Story the Numbers Tell

The Growth Plan draws from a mountain of data. It paints a region with strengths that should be impossible to ignore:

• £118 billion GVA, making the West Midlands the UK’s second-largest regional economy outside London.
• 1.9 million jobs, with strong employment growth post-COVID, but uneven distribution across sectors.
• Average GVA per hour at £34.50, compared to the UK average of £39.50, the stubborn productivity deficit the Plan calls “the five-pound problem.”
• FDI magnetism: 127 inward investment projects landed in 2023, ranking 7th in Europe and 2nd in the UK.
• Export performance: £17 billion in goods exports, led by automotive, med-tech, and advanced manufacturing.
• Digital employment share: up 31 % since 2015, now employing over 100,000 people in ICT-related roles.
• Innovation assets: 16 universities within a two-hour corridor; over 30 innovation centres and R&D campuses; and 10 Innovation Accelerator projects funded by Innovate UK and DSIT.
• Population: 5.9 million, young, diverse, and demographically poised for growth if the skills system can keep pace.

The data underpin the strategy’s three grand pillars, productivity, inclusivity, and sustainability, and six levers: clusters, leadership, the everyday economy, place, people, and institutions.
It is, on paper, elegant.

A Blueprint with Muscle… and Blind Spots

Let’s give credit where it’s due.
The West Midlands Combined Authority (WMCA) team have produced a plan with a rare combination of granular economic modelling and place-based realism. They’ve learned from the scattergun “Industrial Strategy” era: this is targeted, metrics-driven, and written with one eye on delivery.

The emphasis on polycentric growth, connecting Birmingham, Coventry, Wolverhampton, Solihull, and the Black Country into a single spatial strategy, is a masterstroke. It rejects the lazy idea that cities must compete, instead recognising that productivity comes from connectivity. The proposed Spatial Development Strategy (SDS) and the Innovation Corridors running through Enterprise Wharf, Tyseley, and Coventry’s Gigafactory belt show real spatial intelligence.

It also gets governance right. The creation of a new economic delivery vehicle to integrate investment, planning, and innovation is long overdue. Add to that the annual West Midlands Economic Partnership Summit and the commitment to transparent performance dashboards, and suddenly the machinery of delivery looks credible.

But (and there’s always a “but”), the plan still underweights cyber, digital trust, and security. It nods to AI, autonomy, and data-driven manufacturing, but cyber barely earns a mention. That’s not a trivial omission. Cyber is not a bolt-on; it’s the connective tissue that keeps innovation investable, supply chains stable, and productivity gains defensible.

Without a cyber-resilient foundation, the “Growth for Everyone” narrative risks crumbling the first time a ransomware campaign hits a local council or a Tier-1 automotive supplier.

Innovation as the Missing Operating System

Innovation runs through the report like a bright thread, but it isn’t yet wired into the system. There are over 30 innovation assets named, from the Manufacturing Technology Centre (MTC) and Warwick Manufacturing Group (WMG) to Aston’s Advanced Services Group, yet no clear architecture connects them. It’s a network, not a platform.

The Growth Plan calls for the region to be “the UK’s innovation heartland,” but without a coordinating engine, that remains a metaphor. This is where the West Midlands Cyber Hub, the Innovation Alliance for the West Midlands, and TechWM’s Innovation Festival must intersect. Together, they can turn innovation from a static noun into a living system: sandboxes, accelerators, scale-ups, exports. That’s how you build continuity.

Right now, too many pilots die quietly after funding runs out. The Growth Plan gets the diagnosis, but doesn’t yet show the bloodstream.

Skills, Inclusion, and the Numbers That Bite Back

The plan’s skills agenda is urgent but uneven. It projects the need for over 150,000 new or reskilled workers by 2030, with shortages most acute in engineering, digital, and advanced manufacturing. It celebrates FE reform, skills bootcamps, and university partnerships, but the Cyber Security Skills in the UK Labour Market 2025 report tells a harder truth: the system is still failing to convert training into jobs.

The skills challenge isn’t just about numbers; it’s about fit. Employers still overvalue experience, under-invest in entry-level onboarding, and under-utilise neurodiverse and returner talent pools. Meanwhile, London and the South East still capture over 65 % of national digital training provision. The Midlands bears the cost of under-provision and out-migration. Without regional conversion pathways, paid residencies, mid-career transitions, and structured apprenticeships tied to actual roles, the Growth Plan’s people pillar won’t hold.

The Polycentric Promise

Where the plan shines is in its geography. The polycentric model recognises that the Midlands is not one city but a system of linked towns, innovation corridors, and industrial districts. This isn’t just semantics; it’s economic realism. The future of growth lies in corridors, not clusters.

The East–West Transit link, the £2.8 billion Midlands Rail Hub, and the battery-tech corridor stretching from Coventry to Wolverhampton could, if integrated properly, generate real spillovers. Add the Enterprise Zones, Brownfield First housing, and Net-Zero industrial hubs, and the physical backbone looks solid.

But to make the polycentric model work, the region must do three things the report only hints at:

1. Embed cyber resilience in every infrastructure programme, from digital twins to energy grids.
2. Create a unified innovation concierge that links public funding, private capital, and SME access.
3. Publish live benchmarking dashboards, open data on productivity, emissions, resilience, and inclusion, so citizens can see progress and hold leaders to account.

Without transparency, the narrative collapses into press releases.

Comparing WMCA’s Green Paper and the Growth Plan

The West Midlands Futures Green Paper (published earlier this year) set the philosophical frame: “Growth for Everyone”. It was broad, conceptual, and thematic: clusters, leadership, people, place, institutions. The Growth Plan is its engineering manual. It provides the data, delivery vehicles, and spatial design that the Green Paper lacked.

Where the Green Paper was visionary, the Growth Plan is operational. Where the Green Paper talked about AI, this one finally mentions manufacturing output, transport corridors, and investor-readiness. But both still share the same blind spot: they treat cyber and resilience as implicit rather than explicit. Both celebrate innovation, yet neither treats digital trust as infrastructure. That’s the next frontier.

From Blueprint to Platform: A Practitioner’s View

The strength of this plan lies in its granularity. It’s not afraid to talk numbers, KPIs, or failure modes. It models 2 % annual growth through productivity uplift, brownfield housing, skills reform, and FDI attraction. It predicts a £17.4 billion GVA gain if all six levers deliver. But the mechanism still rests on fragile assumptions: that coordination will emerge organically, that industry will self-organise, that innovation will cascade from investment zones into supply chains. It won’t. Not without leadership.

This is where practitioner-led governance matters. Clusters don’t grow from white papers; they grow from collisions: engineers, founders, academics, and policymakers in the same room, solving actual problems. That’s what the West Midlands Cyber Hub and the Cyber Festival model so well. They create physical and psychological proximity.
You can’t benchmark trust from a spreadsheet.

If WMCA, TechWM, and Innovate UK can sustain those collisions, the Growth Plan can move from blueprint to platform.

Constructive Critique: Delivery, Direction, and the Real Work Ahead

Let’s be clear: this isn’t a bad plan. It’s the best piece of regional strategy I’ve seen in a decade, better than the “Big City Plan” which was the last piece of work that I felt was as ambitious as this. But it still isn’t good enough to work.

It reads like something written by clever people who understand economics, but haven’t had to run an engineering team, deliver a system under fire, or fight a procurement bureaucracy that burns six months over a £30k pilot. It’s too safe. Too polished. Not enough operational muscle behind the vision.

The fundamentals are there: productivity, corridors, skills, clusters, institutions, but the execution risk is everywhere you look. The West Midlands Growth Plan could deliver a regional renaissance, or it could become another glossy PDF gathering dust in a council SharePoint. Right now, it’s 60/40 the wrong way. Here’s why.

1. Funding Silos and the Illusion of Coherence

Money is still trapped in silos: DSIT, Innovate UK, DLUHC, BEIS (or whatever it’s called this month). They all talk about “alignment” but run on different cycles, reporting calendars, and KPIs. By the time one fund clears its approvals, another has closed. Projects time out mid-flight, and delivery teams lose their momentum chasing compliance rather than outcomes.

The region needs a single investment rail, not half a dozen parallel tracks. Without a unified capital mechanism, we’ll keep getting pilot projects that prove the point but die before scaling it.

2. Institutional Churn and the Death of Continuity

Every 24 months, we rename something: LEPs, Growth Hubs, partnerships. We move logos, not levers. Continuity dies with staff turnover, and institutional memory gets replaced by consultants recycling last year’s conclusions in new PowerPoint templates.

The West Midlands doesn’t need another “Taskforce” or “Delivery Vehicle”. It needs people with ten-year horizons and operational authority, not programme managers waiting for the next reorg.

3. Governance Without Teeth

The plan talks about dashboards, summits, and new governance structures. Great. But who actually owns delivery? Most KPIs are internal; none are binding. Nobody’s career depends on whether Birmingham hits its GVA target or Wolverhampton’s innovation corridor actually launches. Until success and failure are visible, measured quarterly, publicly, and brutally, governance will be ornamental.

4. The AI Fetish

There’s a dangerous obsession with “AI clusters.” AI is a tool, not a strategy. It’s being waved around like the solution to every regional problem, while cyber, manufacturing, and logistics, the real productivity engines, are treated as legacy. If AI is the headline, the infrastructure holding it up is the footnote. That’s backwards. You don’t build a smart city on an insecure foundation.

5. Skills: The Conversion Black Hole

Everyone loves a boot camp. Ministers get photo ops, providers get invoices, and learners get certificates. But barely 15 % transition into jobs that match their training. Why? Because employers still demand “experience over capability.” Until we start funding residencies, apprenticeships, and transition programmes that pay people to learn on the job, we’re not solving skills; we’re manufacturing frustration.

6. Inclusion and Narrative Fatigue

“Inclusive growth” is the phrase of the decade, but nobody defines it. Inclusion isn’t a panel or a campaign; it’s pay, housing, transport, and childcare. It’s whether a single parent from Dudley can take a cybersecurity residency without bankrupting themselves. The Growth Plan gestures at inclusion, but it doesn’t fund it. Until it does, the phrase will stay hollow.

None of these flaws are fatal. But they’re the difference between press releases and progress. If leadership wants to prove this plan isn’t another round of performative optimism, it has to stop chasing headlines and start protecting delivery.

Making It Real: What Has to Change

If this region is serious, it needs fewer slogans and more engineering discipline. That means clarity, sequence, ownership, and auditability, the same things that keep a large-scale system stable in production.

1. Cyber as Economic Infrastructure

Stop treating cyber as a side quest. It’s the backbone of manufacturing, med-tech, logistics, and FDI confidence. Create a Cyber Infrastructure Board, jointly owned by WMCA and DSIT, that treats resilience the same way we treat energy and transport, with budgets, metrics, and accountability.

2. Innovation as a Pipeline, Not a Buzzword

Every university has an incubator, every cluster an accelerator, every agency a new pilot. None are joined up. Build a single Innovation Spine linking Aston, BCU, Warwick, and Wolverhampton, with shared testbeds, export-readiness support, and IP commercialisation rules that don’t trap founders in red tape.
Innovation isn’t a competition. It’s a supply chain of ideas.

3. Skills Conversion That Pays

We need 500 cyber residencies and 1,000 mid-career transition placements, funded regionally and tied to employer outcomes. If you can pay people to dig holes, you can pay them to become secure-by-design engineers. This is the bridge between education and industry. Build it properly or stop pretending we have a skills strategy.

4. Capital That De-Risks Delivery

Set up a West Midlands Productivity & Inclusion Fund, blending sovereign wealth, pension capital, and private investment. Use it to co-invest in infrastructure, not endless pilots. Measure ROI in job retention and SME maturity, not just PR mentions.

5. Radical Transparency

Publish a Regional Resilience Dashboard, quarterly, public, unavoidable. Show cyber maturity, SME health, infrastructure uptime, and skills conversion rates.
If the numbers go backwards, fix it, not spin it.

6. Practitioner Governance

Enough with the committees stuffed with “stakeholders”. Create a Practitioner Council, including engineers, founders, researchers, and delivery managers, people who actually build things. Give them a line of sight into funding and performance. Make them the conscience of delivery.

7. A Narrative That Reflects Reality

The real story of this region isn’t “AI and shiny offices”. It’s factories, labs, startups, public sector teams, and community spaces fighting to build continuity in chaos.
That’s what “cyber-led, digitally enabled, commercially grounded” actually means.
It’s not branding. It’s survival.

Conclusion

The Bigger Picture: What Regionalism Must Become

The West Midlands isn’t waiting for Westminster anymore. This is where we prove whether devolution works or doesn’t.

We’re building a new model: practitioner-led regionalism. Not trickle-down, not consultancy-up, but inside-out delivery, where people who build systems, run networks, and teach the next generation shape the strategy, not just comment on it.

If we get this right, we don’t just fix our own region, we set a national precedent.
A region that shows you can grow through competence, not charisma. Through collaboration, not branding.

And if we get it wrong? Westminster will roll its eyes, re-centralise everything, and tell us localism failed.

Wrap Up: No More PDFs

The West Midlands Growth Plan 2025 is the closest we’ve come to a credible regional playbook. It’s data-driven, detailed, and well-intentioned, but intent doesn’t deliver outcomes. Delivery does.

If this plan is going to matter, it needs three things:

1. Continuity — stop resetting the game every election.
2. Accountability — show the data, admit the failures, fix them fast.
3. Practitioner leadership — the people who understand risk, build systems, and deliver under constraints must be the ones steering the wheel.

The West Midlands has the assets, brains, and backbone to do this. But plans don’t build futures, people do. Let’s stop admiring the ambition and start engineering the outcome.

Because the world doesn’t need another strategy document. It needs proof that regional growth, cyber resilience, and innovation can actually coexist in the real world, not just in policy PDFs.

Appendix: Key Data Points

This appendix consolidates headline evidence drawn from the West Midlands Growth Plan (2025) and related WMCA datasets. It’s included here to ground the critique and recommendations in hard numbers, showing the region’s genuine scale, potential, and friction points.

Economic Scale & Growth Ambition

• Regional economy: £77 billion GVA (2023, constant 2022 prices).
• Projected growth: +£17.4 billion by 2035 under the accelerated growth pathway.
• Employment uplift: +93,000 people (+5 % of the economically active population).
• Target growth rate: 2 % p.a. to 2035 (vs 1.7–1.8 % OBR UK forecast).
• Worker productivity: +£8 600 per worker by 2035 under the accelerated model.

Innovation & Industrial Strengths

• FDI position: Top 20 region in Europe; #2 in the UK (after London) for jobs created by FDI.
• Innovation leadership: England’s only Regional Innovation Valley; finalist in the European Capital of Innovation Awards 2024.
• R&D ecosystem: Six research-intensive and nine teaching universities, with strong translational capacity.
• Priority high-growth clusters:
  • Advanced engineering/light EV & battery manufacturing
  • Clean tech & smart energy systems
  • Health & medical devices / digital health
  • Digital, tech & creative industries
  • Next-generation professional services

Skills & Workforce

• Economically inactive: 25.7 % of the working-age population (~481,400 people), including 112,000 due to caring responsibilities.
• Youth unemployment: 8.8 % (WM) vs 5.0 % (UK average).
• Ethnic employment gap: ≈ 38,000 fewer ethnic-minority residents employed despite equal qualifications.
• Qualification shift (past decade): No formal quals down from 16.8 % → 10.6 %; degree-level or higher up to 42 %.
• Forecast skills demand by 2035: 55 % of jobs at Level 4+ (Higher Education equivalent).
• STEM Level 3 skills: identified as critical to the future economy.
• Major initiatives:
  • AI Skills Action Plan & AI Academy (£10 m)
  • Green and Construction Skills Action Plans
  • £30 m Skills Innovation Challenge Fund

Infrastructure & Place

• Digital connectivity: 94 % gigabit broadband coverage (UK avg 74 %); highest 5G coverage of any English city-region.
• Housing target: 12,200 new homes per year with higher density around transport hubs.
• Transport capital programme: £2.4 billion fund moving toward full bus franchising by 2029 and expanded rail devolution.
• Net Zero Plan (2027–2032): smart energy systems and large-scale retrofit programme.
• Climate risk: up to £2.9 billion annual economic loss by 2050 if unmitigated.
• Flagship projects:
  • Coventry Very Light Rail – battery-powered zero-emission transit (30 cm track depth innovation).
  • Port Loop (Birmingham Ladywood) – 1,150 homes plus green infrastructure.

Business & Investment

• High-growth base: 370 current high-growth businesses; 1,100 with high-growth potential.
• SME support: Business Growth West Midlands serves 8,000 + SMEs annually.
• High Growth Programme: 50 SMEs, £4 m investment, £15 m turnover uplift (≈ 11:1 ROI).
• SME productivity gap: linked to leadership and management training deficits.
• Implementation leverage: £10 billion annual regional spend to be aligned with Growth Plan delivery.

Devolution & Governance

• Integrated funding settlement: £400 million pilot from 2025.
• Innovation Accelerator: expanded to 10 regions nationwide following WMCA success.
• Status upgrade: WMCA to be designated an Established Mayoral Strategic Authority.
• Shared national–regional priorities with HMG:
  1. Skills & employment
  2. Housing & commercial development
  3. Innovation (diffusion and commercialisation of R&D)