Regions across England and Wales are set to receive grants of up to £20 million each through the Local Innovation Partnerships Fund, as the government pushes to spread high-growth economic activity beyond London and the South East. The latest allocations form part of a wider £500 million programme, with certain northern English regions — including East Yorkshire, Hull and Tees Valley — eligible for enhanced packages of up to £30 million given their strategic importance to the UK’s net zero transition.
Each region will focus investment on sectors where it already has demonstrable strength. In the South West, funding will go toward autonomous technologies — drones operating across land, sea and air — with an ambition to establish the area as a global testing and deployment hub. The Oxford-Cambridge Growth Corridor will use its allocation to close the gap between research and commercial application in autonomous vehicles, high-performance engineering and space technology.
Greater Lincolnshire is targeting the overlap between agri-tech and defence capabilities, aiming to turn local expertise into commercially viable products. South-West Wales will invest in two linked clusters: offshore wind and hydrogen for energy security, and recycling and processing of critical materials to reduce import dependence. The East Midlands will focus on scaling clean energy and advanced manufacturing, including validation facilities designed to help smaller businesses work alongside large global manufacturers.
Delivery will be managed in partnership with UK Research and Innovation, with local partners responsible for designing projects that move research through to commercial outcomes. The programme’s stated goals are to accelerate collaborative R&D, attract specialist talent, and create clearer routes to private investment and market entry.
The initiative reflects a deliberate shift toward place-based innovation policy — the idea that economic returns from technology development need to be geographically distributed rather than concentrated in a handful of established hubs. Whether the funding achieves that ambition will depend on how effectively regional partners can translate sector strengths into businesses that attract sustained private capital rather than relying on successive rounds of public grants.