Reform UK today set out plans to create Industrial Strongholds, starting in the Black Country, to reverse decades of industrial decline and bring investment and high-quality jobs back to Britain’s forgotten towns and cities. Treasury spokesman Robert Jenrick announced the policy at a rally in Wolverhampton this afternoon, at the party’s First 100 Days event.
Jenrick says a Reform government “will create Industrial Strongholds to bring industry back to the places that invented it.” In each of them, “businesses will get big tax breaks if – and only if – they grow and develop their firms there.” The first, he says, “will be in and around the Black Country. All of it. Wolverhampton. Dudley. Sandwell. Walsall. And Cannock.”
Each Stronghold would be a defined area in which firms would be offered incentives for a fixed ten-year period. Those would include streamlined planning, with a presumption in favour of development under an updated local plan, 100 percent first-year tax relief on new brownfield residential buildings, extensions and substantial improvements, and a ten-year exemption from the extra business rates that result from new investment, from improvements, and from opening in a high-street shop that has been vacant for more than two years. On hiring, employer National Insurance would be cut by 50 percent on the first £50,000 of earnings for net new hires, for five years.
The party says much of the decline has been driven by the pursuit of renewables, leaving Britain with industrial energy prices “63 per cent above the international median.” Department for Energy Security and Net Zero figures, derived from International Energy Agency data, put UK industrial electricity at 26.63p a kilowatt hour including taxes in 2024, against an IEA median of 16.33p, among 25 member countries. Reform has already committed to restarting licensing for new oil and gas fields, abolishing the energy profits levy and the Emissions Trading Scheme, repudiating AR7 contracts for difference and scrapping AR8.
In the Black Country alone, the party says, around 7,000 jobs were lost in 2024 — a figure for all jobs, not manufacturing alone. It points to the closure of Krispy Kreme’s Tipton production site, which employed more than 50 people and shut in October. A company spokesman said the decision was “necessary to put us on the right footing and help us return to sustainable, profitable growth.” Reform also cites Denby Pottery, founded in 1809, which ended UK manufacturing this year after pointing to high energy and labour costs.
The Strongholds package is distinct from the nationwide cut in the main employer National Insurance rate, from 15 per cent to 13.8 per cent, as set out in Reform’s Economic Rescue Plan and in this website’s coverage today of a claimed £140 saving on the annual food shop. Jenrick’s Wolverhampton remarks are due this afternoon.
