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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	Norwich & the EastEast of England	Teesside & the HumberNorth East / Yorkshire and the Humber	Liverpool City RegionNorth West
Sectors	AgriTech & FoodTech, Engineering Biology, Clean Energy Supporting: Life Sciences, Digital Technologies	Clean Energy, Advanced Manufacturing, Advanced Materials Supporting: Digital Technologies, AgriTech & FoodTech	Life Sciences, Engineering Biology, Advanced Materials Supporting: Digital Technologies, Clean Energy, Creative Industries
Research	University of East Anglia John Innes Centre Quadram Institute	Not recorded on the map.	University of Liverpool Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine
Companies	Not recorded on the map.	Not recorded on the map.	Not recorded on the map.
Infrastructure	Not recorded on the map. Plant and food research institutes, genomics facilities and offshore energy operations bases.	Centre for Process Innovation Process innovation and biologics scale-up facilities, port capacity and grid-connected industrial land.	Not recorded on the map. University research institutes, automated chemistry facilities and port and logistics assets.
Capital	Research council and charitable funding dominate; venture capital is scarce.	Infrastructure capital, corporate investment and public programmes; almost no local venture base.	A modest local investor base; public and charitable research funding dominate.
Government programmes	Freeport East — Freeports	Teesside Freeport — Freeports Humber Freeport — Freeports	Liverpool City Region Freeport — Freeports
What exists	Plant, food and genomics research of international standing, offshore energy operations and maintenance, and a significant agricultural production base on the doorstep.	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.	Infection and tropical medicine research of international standing, materials chemistry and automated discovery, a large port and a Freeport designation.
What's missing · UKIZ interpretation	Commercial translation of agri-food science, and connection between offshore energy operations and the research base inland.	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.	Translation capacity: strong discovery science with limited local scale-up manufacturing and limited early-stage capital to hold companies in the city region.
What could connect · UKIZ interpretation	Agri-food and genomics research connected to national food manufacturing and to engineering biology capacity, and offshore operations connected to the Humber and North East energy supply chain.	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.	Infection and biologics research connected to North West and Teesside biomanufacturing capacity, with the port used for export rather than only import.
UKIZ relevance	Food security and biotechnology intersect here more clearly than anywhere else in Britain, and connect to the proposed Oxford–Cambridge mission.	This is where Britain either builds an energy supply chain or imports one. The proposed Teesside & Humber mission is explicitly about retained industrial capability.	Discovery and manufacture sit unusually close together here. The proposed Manchester mission treats the North West as one health and biomanufacturing geography.
Last verified	15 August 2026	15 August 2026	15 August 2026

Proposed by UKIZ · not a government designation

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