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Two or three clusters, read side by side across sectors, research, companies, capital, infrastructure, government designations and UKIZ relevance. There is no score and no ranking: British clusters are different from one another, not better or worse than one another.

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Dimension	Liverpool City RegionNorth West	OxfordSouth East	Birmingham & the West MidlandsWest Midlands
Sectors	Life Sciences, Engineering Biology, Advanced Materials Supporting: Digital Technologies, Clean Energy, Creative Industries	Quantum Technologies, Life Sciences, Space, Artificial Intelligence Supporting: Clean Energy, Advanced Materials, Engineering Biology	Mobility & Transport Technology, Advanced Manufacturing, Quantum Technologies, Advanced Materials Supporting: Clean Energy, Digital Technologies, Defence & Security
Research	University of Liverpool Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine	University of Oxford Rutherford Appleton Laboratory	University of Birmingham University of Warwick WMG
Companies	Not recorded on the map.	Not recorded on the map.	Not recorded on the map.
Infrastructure	Not recorded on the map. University research institutes, automated chemistry facilities and port and logistics assets.	Harwell Science and Innovation Campus Diamond Light Source Satellite Applications Catapult National laboratory campus facilities, quantum fabrication and metrology capability, and clinical research infrastructure.	Energy Systems Catapult UK Battery Industrialisation Centre Automotive research centres, battery and vehicle test facilities and major logistics assets.
Capital	A modest local investor base; public and charitable research funding dominate.	University-linked funds and specialist deep tech investors, with London capital an hour away.	Corporate and supply chain finance dominate; venture capital is thin relative to industrial output.
Government programmes	Liverpool City Region Freeport — Freeports	No place-based designation recorded.	West Midlands Investment Zone — Investment Zones
What exists	Infection and tropical medicine research of international standing, materials chemistry and automated discovery, a large port and a Freeport designation.	A research-intensive university alongside the Harwell campus, one of the largest concentrations of national scientific infrastructure in Britain, spanning space, energy, health and physical sciences, with distinctive quantum, vaccine and space applications strength.	The largest manufacturing base in the UK by employment, automotive and electrification engineering, rail and mobility research, and a young, large working-age population.
What's missing · UKIZ interpretation	Translation capacity: strong discovery science with limited local scale-up manufacturing and limited early-stage capital to hold companies in the city region.	Access. National facilities are heavily used by their own communities; companies without an existing university relationship find the route in unclear. Scale-up space and later-stage capital are also constrained.	Ownership of the value in electrified vehicles: battery, power electronics and software increasingly sit outside the region and outside the UK. Innovation-active SME supply chains are under-capitalised.
What could connect · UKIZ interpretation	Infection and biologics research connected to North West and Teesside biomanufacturing capacity, with the port used for export rather than only import.	Opening national facility access to companies across Britain as shared ecosystem infrastructure, and pairing Oxford quantum and space capability with manufacturing clusters that could produce at volume.	Midlands manufacturing paired with battery and power electronics research, North East battery production and Coventry testing capability as a single electrification value chain.
UKIZ relevance	Discovery and manufacture sit unusually close together here. The proposed Manchester mission treats the North West as one health and biomanufacturing geography.	Oxford has infrastructure most countries cannot build. The proposed zone focuses on making that infrastructure accessible to companies that are not spin-outs of the university.	The region's transition depends on owning the new value in a vehicle rather than assembling someone else's. The proposed Midlands zone focuses on batteries, power electronics and software.
Last verified	15 August 2026	15 August 2026	15 August 2026

Proposed by UKIZ · independent · not a government designation

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