Most regional growth strategies land on an owner’s desk, get skimmed and get filed. Usually that is the right call. This one is worth twenty minutes, because the money behind it has changed shape.
The Liverpool City Region Growth Plan 2025–2035 is the Combined Authority’s ten-year economic strategy. Over the past eighteen months it has stopped being a document and started being a budget.
If you already run a business here, with a team and a customer base, one question matters. Does any of this change what you should be doing?
What the Liverpool City Region Growth Plan commits to
The headline is productivity. The plan puts the region’s economy at around £43 billion, serving a population of 1.6 million. It is blunt about the problem. GVA per hour worked sits at roughly £40, which the plan says is about 11% below the England average. Everything else in the document hangs off closing that gap.
The ambition is to add upwards of £10 billion of GVA over the decade, backed by what the plan calls an £11 billion investment pipeline.
Three measurable targets tell you where public money will point. The equivalent of 5% of GVA invested in R&D each year by 2030. A 25% uplift in foreign direct investment by 2030. An 80% employment rate.
That last one matters most to established employers. An 80% employment target, in a region also chasing inward investment, is a signal about labour as much as opportunity. If the plan works even partly, hiring gets harder before it gets easier.
The sectors the region is backing
The plan names five growth sectors: health and life sciences, digital and technologies, creative industries, advanced manufacturing, and clean energy. It treats three more as critical supporting sectors: maritime, professional and business services, and the visitor economy.
The numbers attached to those sectors tell you more than the labels.
Advanced manufacturing employs around 22,000 directly and roughly 50,000 across wider manufacturing. It contributes about £3 billion, and the region accounts for around 15% of UK car production. Digital and technology covers 3,000-plus businesses and around 24,000 jobs. Creative industries employ 15,000-plus and have grown about 29% in five years. Life sciences accounts for around 7,000 jobs. Maritime has an economic impact the plan puts at £5 billion.
The supporting sectors carry real weight. Separately, the region’s visitor economy was reported in August 2026 to have hit a record £6.834 billion in 2025, with 61.5 million visitors and 57,591 jobs supported.
If you supply, service, staff or sell to hospitality and leisure, that number is bigger than most of the growth-sector headlines.
The Industrial Strategy Zone and where the advantages sit
In March 2026 the Combined Authority announced the Industrial Strategy Zone. It pulls the existing Freeport and Life Sciences Innovation Zone programmes into one framework, backed by £185 million of government funding. It targets advanced manufacturing, pharmaceuticals, logistics and clean energy.
This is the part with immediate consequences, because the incentives are geographic. Six tax sites carry them: Sci-Tech Daresbury, St Helens Manufacturing and Innovation Campus, Maghull Health Park, Wirral Waters, Parkside in St Helens, and 3MG in Halton.
Occupiers at those sites can access 100% business rate relief for five years, Stamp Duty Land Tax exemption, employer National Insurance relief for three years, and enhanced capital allowances. Whether any of that applies to you is a question for your accountant.
Two observations.
The reliefs are tied to premises. They matter to a narrow set of owners: those genuinely weighing a move, an extra site or a capital-heavy expansion, and only where a listed site works operationally. Relocating to chase rate relief is usually the tail wagging the dog.
The second point applies far more widely. Those sites will be built out, fitted out, powered, serviced, staffed and supplied. That work spills well beyond the fence.
The money has changed shape, and that matters
The biggest shift for established businesses is how the region now deploys capital. In March 2026 the Combined Authority launched a £2 billion Investment Fund. In May 2026 it followed with an investment strategy built around loans, equity and recyclable investment, moving away from one-off grants.
In practice that means fewer small grant pots and more large capital projects. For an established business, the opportunity now looks like “a contract I can win, or a customer whose order book is about to grow”. “A grant I can claim” is getting rarer.
Those are different disciplines. A grant needs a form filled in. A contract needs commercial readiness.
Research funding follows the same logic. In June 2026 the region secured £30 million from the national Local Innovation Partnership Fund. £15 million goes to an AI-enabled materials chemistry programme at the University of Liverpool, and £8.7 million to a biofilms innovation centre. Both are research money. Both create demand for procurement and specialist services over several years.
What this means for a business already trading here
Strip out the policy language and there are three realistic ways this reaches an established firm.
Your customers may be in a priority sector even if you are outside one. Second-order demand is where most established businesses will feel this. An accountancy practice, a recruiter, an engineering subcontractor, a fit-out firm, an IT provider, a logistics operator. None is on the growth-sector list. All of them sell to businesses that are.
So the question is what share of your revenue already comes from customers on the list. And whether you built on that deliberately or simply ended up there.
Labour is likely to get tighter before it gets looser. An 80% employment ambition, thousands of projected jobs in life sciences and clean energy, and significant inward investment all point the same way. If you depend on skilled trades, technicians or experienced operators, you will be competing for them against better-funded employers with a national profile. Retention stops being a soft issue and becomes a capacity issue.
Contract sizes are likely to rise faster than most local firms’ readiness to bid. Larger, capital-backed projects come with procurement expectations many good businesses cannot meet yet. Accreditations. Insurance levels. Health and safety systems. Financial resilience. ESG and social value reporting. The working capital to fund a delivery gap.
That is the most common reason a capable local firm watches a contract go elsewhere. It is fixable with twelve months’ notice. Three weeks before a tender closes is too late.
The capacity question owners tend to skip
There is a version of this article that ends with “so get ready for the opportunity”. That advice is useless. The narrower truth is this. A bigger contract fails at delivery, and it fails on cash.
Work at two or three times your usual job size means funding materials, labour and overheads for longer before payment arrives, usually on the customer’s terms. It needs a delivery team that can absorb it while keeping the existing book, and systems that hold up when volume doubles.
Plenty of firms have been badly damaged by growth they sold and could not fund. The balance sheet conversation belongs at the start of that decision.
The region’s own business support service, Growth Platform, runs free supply chain and procurement diagnostics. It also offers export support and sector cluster specialists in advanced manufacturing, digital and creative, and health and life sciences. If you are working out whether you are credible in a bigger supply chain, it is a sensible, genuinely free first port of call.
Questions to take into your own planning
Put these on the agenda at your next planning session. They are deliberately specific, because “we should look at the growth plan” is a wish.
- What percentage of last year’s revenue came from customers in the five named growth sectors, or from the visitor economy? Do we actually know, or are we guessing?
- Is that share rising or falling? Was that a decision or an accident?
- If the largest contract in our pipeline doubled in size, what would break first: cash, delivery capacity or systems?
- Which accreditations, insurance levels or reporting standards do larger buyers in our sector require that we lack? What would they cost, and how long would they take to get?
- Could we fund a 90-day payment gap on a contract three times our average job value without stopping something else?
- Which of our roles would be hardest to replace if a well-funded employer opened nearby in the next two years? What have we done about it?
- Do any of the six tax sites genuinely suit our operation, or do we simply like the reliefs?
- Who in our business owns the relationship with Growth Platform, the Chamber or the relevant sector cluster? If the answer is nobody, why?
If you can answer the first two from your own numbers within an hour, your management information is in good shape. If you can’t, that is the more urgent finding.
Plan against the direction of travel
Regional strategies change the weather for a business. Some sectors get more demand. Labour gets tighter. Contracts get bigger. The firms that saw it coming take the work when it appears.
Nobody knows how much of a ten-year plan will be delivered. The direction of travel is clear enough to plan against, and the questions above are worth answering whether or not the £10 billion arrives.
What they surface is worth fixing on its own merits. Customer concentration. Cash headroom. Delivery capacity. Key-person risk.
If you want a structured way to work through them, that is what a 90-day planning process is for. It is what we do with owners on our coaching programmes. You can read more about how I work with established businesses across Liverpool and the North West, or book a call and talk it through.
Sources: Liverpool City Region Growth Plan 2025–2035; Combined Authority announcements on the Industrial Strategy Zone and £2bn Investment Fund (March 2026) and the Local Innovation Partnership Fund (June 2026); Growth Platform.
Luke Kay owns ActionCOACH Liverpool and is an award-winning business coach in Liverpool, working with established businesses on profit, systems and team.
