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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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Side by side

Dimension	Liverpool City RegionNorth West	Teesside & the HumberNorth East / Yorkshire and the Humber	Sheffield & RotherhamYorkshire and the Humber
Sectors	Life Sciences, Engineering Biology, Advanced Materials Supporting: Digital Technologies, Clean Energy, Creative Industries	Clean Energy, Advanced Manufacturing, Advanced Materials Supporting: Digital Technologies, AgriTech & FoodTech	Advanced Manufacturing, Advanced Materials Supporting: Clean Energy, Robotics & Autonomous Systems, Mobility & Transport Technology, Digital Technologies
Research	University of Liverpool Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine	Not recorded on the map.	University of Sheffield
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.	Centre for Process Innovation Process innovation and biologics scale-up facilities, port capacity and grid-connected industrial land.	Advanced Manufacturing Research Centre Nuclear AMRC High Value Manufacturing Catapult centres, nuclear manufacturing facilities and industrial research factories.
Capital	A modest local investor base; public and charitable research funding dominate.	Infrastructure capital, corporate investment and public programmes; almost no local venture base.	Public co-investment, corporate partnership and asset finance rather than venture capital.
Government programmes	Liverpool City Region Freeport — Freeports	Teesside Freeport — Freeports Humber Freeport — Freeports	No place-based designation recorded.
What exists	Infection and tropical medicine research of international standing, materials chemistry and automated discovery, a large port and a Freeport designation.	The largest concentration of industrial decarbonisation activity in the UK: hydrogen, carbon capture, process manufacturing, biologics scale-up capability and two Freeports with substantial serviced industrial land.	One of the strongest applied manufacturing research bases in Europe, covering machining, materials, nuclear manufacturing and factory-scale process development, working directly with industrial customers.
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.	Skills pipelines and company formation. The land, power and permits exist; the innovation companies and the technical workforce to fill them do not yet exist at the same scale.	Domestic demand. World-class process capability is often demonstrated for overseas primes, and local SMEs lack the capital to adopt what is proven a mile away.
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.	Industrial land and process scale-up capability connected to research clusters elsewhere that have technologies without a place to build them — a national scale-up site rather than a regional one.	Applied manufacturing research connected to domestic customers — energy, defence, mobility and medical technology — with procurement used as the connector rather than grants.
UKIZ relevance	Discovery and manufacture sit unusually close together here. The proposed Manchester mission treats the North West as one health and biomanufacturing geography.	This is where Britain either builds an energy supply chain or imports one. The proposed Teesside & Humber mission is explicitly about retained industrial capability.	The research is world class; the domestic customer base for what it produces is thinner than it should be. The proposed Midlands and Teesside & Humber missions both depend on this capability.
Last verified	15 August 2026	15 August 2026	15 August 2026

Proposed by UKIZ · independent · not a government designation

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