Blueprint for UK Competitiveness
Supporting your business to grow through a successful industrial strategy.
The UK economy has faced transformative challenges over the past decade, including the global pandemic, shifts in international trade, and a rapidly changing geopolitical landscape. If harnessed correctly, these challenges present opportunities for the UK to lead the G7 in economic growth.
In this Blueprint for UK Competitiveness, the CBI identifies five critical economic shifts that need to be leveraged for the UK to gain a competitive advantage, then unpacks five policy tools to drive such growth across all segments of the UK economy.
Alongside this five-by-five model, the CBI emphasises the need, first, for a modern industrial strategy that embraces trade and foreign policy while prioritising innovation, sustainability, and collaboration across sectors, and second, for the government’s industrial strategy to play a primary role within the 2025 Spending Review, which would provide a downpayment on growth and catalyse private investment across the country.
CBI members have suggested that realism, prioritisation, and confidence be the government’s guiding principles as it weaves together a successful industrial and trade strategy and engages in complex policy debates. Businesses like yours can play a key role in co-creating a pro-business economy.
CBI members have identified the following five critical economic shifts:
- Funding competitiveness through deeper capital markets and an agile fiscal policy framework
- Delivering on the UK’s Net Zero targets through sustainable investments and regulatory innovation
- Evolving our labour market, ensuring the right balance of skills, health, and productivity for future growth
- Harnessing digital technology, particularly AI, to revolutionise both the public and private sectors
- Balancing economic security with international trade policy to secure the UK’s position in an increasingly protectionist world.
And the following five policy tools:
Tackling drivers of growth first
- Deliver planning reform for infrastructure delivery
- Prioritise regulatory competitiveness
- Strengthen workforce skills and labour market depth
- Encourage technology adoption and innovation
- Leverage public-private partnerships.
Assessing national assets
- Celebrate and build on institutional excellence
- Recognise diversity within the UK’s industrial base
- Highlight capital market strength
- Prioritise trade and investment.
Minimising opportunity cost
- Fund competitiveness through capital markets and fiscal policy
- Deliver the UK’s Net Zero targets
- Harness the power of the UK’s digital economy and R&D base
- Balance trade and economic security
- Proactively address evolution in the demography, skills base, health, and productivity of the UK’s future labour market.
Picking races over winners
- Lead the G7 in green infrastructure delivery
- Become the most resilient G7 economy
- Create the world-leading regulatory framework for growth
- Become the dynamic world leader in diversified trade.
Asking ‘How does this play across the UK?’
- Prioritise partnership with devolved governments
- Aligns Local Growth Plans with the national industrial strategy.
Blueprint for UK Competitiveness
If you are interested in finding out more about the CBI’s Blueprint for UK Competitiveness, please contact Devon Geary.
The Blueprint for UK Competitiveness comprises one strand of the CBI’s work on industrial strategy. Another major strand has been the CBI’s response to the government’s Invest 2035 consultation. View the CBI’s full consultation response.
For more information about the consultation response or the CBI’s industrial strategy policy work, please contact Mark Goldstone.
Blueprint for UK Competitiveness