The Great North: One Year On

A year ago, the North's mayors made a simple promise: stop waiting for a story written in Whitehall, and write their own. Twelve months on, that promise has moved from launch to delivery. The region now also has an unusual asset it didn't have before: one of its founding mayors is now Prime Minister.

From launch to delivery

The Great North still brings together 11 current and emerging Strategic Authorities, stretching from the Scottish border to the edge of Wales; the only part of the UK fully covered by devolution, with more than 90% of its population under an elected mayor. What has changed in a year is the tone. The launch rallying cry, “The North’s moment is now,” has matured into a sharper market proposition: One North. One Voice. One Story. That shift plays out across four collaboration pillars the partnership works to: Clean Energy Investment, Trade & Investment Profile, Culture, Creative and Sporting Industries, and Deepening Devolution .

The proof point: an actual prospectus

At launch, investment products were a promise. They are now real. The Great North Investment Prospectus, developed with the Office for Investment, sets out investment-ready opportunities aligned to all eight Industrial Strategy sectors, from York Central and Leeds regeneration to the Don Valley Corridor, Atom Valley and the East Coast Cluster.

The region’s first pan-Northern Investment Summit followed on May 18th 2026 at Leeds Dock, pitching the North collectively to sovereign wealth funds and institutional investors under a single brand for the first time. Government material now puts the Northern economy at £466bn up from the £340bn+ baseline the partnership launched. The private sector has already put a number behind its own confidence: NatWest has committed £20bn of funding to the North over ten years, the first major bank-backed pledge of its kind since the partnership launched.

Devolution keeps maturing

Hull and East Yorkshire has completed its first full year in the partnership under Mayor Luke Campbell. Cumbria and Cheshire & Warrington remain in the Devolution Priority Programme, with their first mayoral elections now set for May 2027 rather than this year.

The UK Industrial Strategy, a draft at launch, is now settled government policy, giving the North’s investment case a fixed national backdrop. The mayoralty currently sits without a permanent or interim chief executive in post worth watching ahead of any further devolution deal. Tees Valley’s Tom Bryant remains interim chief executive, unchanged since launch. Mark Rogers, previously interim at Hull and East Yorkshire, has since moved on to become interim chief executive at the Sussex and Brighton Strategic Authority.

A Northern voice at the centre

In July, the story gained a chapter nobody wrote into the launch brochure. Andy Burnham, until then mayor of Greater Manchester and a founding member of The Great North, became Prime Minister, with Bev Craig succeeding him in Manchester.

Within days, the partnership’s 11 leaders wrote to him directly, asking to be treated not as a regional lobby group but as “a strategic partner in the governance of the United Kingdom.” By the end of the month, the government had set out plans for mayors to keep a greater share of locally raised business rates from 2027 and income tax from 2028, alongside a Manchester-based “No.10 North” operation designed to give mayors a standing seat at the table.

It’s too early to say how this will play out, and not everyone in the North is treating it as settled. Tees Valley’s Ben Houchen, a signatory to that same letter, has already questioned how far the new funding genuinely loosens Whitehall’s grip. But for a partnership whose entire pitch has been “give us the tools and we’ll deliver,” having a Prime Minister who built his own reputation on that exact argument is, at minimum, a different starting position than the one The Great North launched from a year ago.

Reaching beyond the North

Interestingly the committee has gone beyond the original scope and added two further initiatives.

A Northern trade mission to India is being planned under a single banner, building on the UK–India trade agreement to open doors in automotive, life sciences and advanced materials. The partnership is also exploring, in its earliest stages, a bid to host the Olympic and Paralympic Games in the North in the 2040s.

The Great North Run: a growing platform

The brand The Great North borrowed its name and momentum from is still growing too. This year’s Great North Run drew around 63,000 entrants for the 13.1-mile route, with roughly 85,000 people taking part in events across the full weekend — evidence that the “Great North” name already carried public reach before the partnership adopted it, and that the underlying platform is still expanding.

The delivery challenge is increasingly a talent challenge

Investment may create the opportunity, but delivering it requires people.

Across the built environment, skills shortages can no longer be considered solely a recruitment issue. In some areas, they are increasingly becoming a constraint on delivery.

Planning capacity, construction skills, infrastructure expertise and specialist development talent will all be critical if the North is to convert investment ambition into projects on the ground. As development, regeneration, infrastructure and energy pipelines grow, the risk is that demand for specialist skills grows faster than the talent available to deliver them.

It is also why Cobalt is working with BE News on the Map the Gap campaign, an industry-wide initiative designed to measure where skills shortages exist across the wider built environment, what is driving them and where employers and employees are experiencing the greatest pressure.

The principle is simple: before we can close the skills gap, we need to understand its scale and where it exists.

Through separate employer and employee surveys, the campaign is looking beyond construction alone to understand skills challenges across commercial real estate, housing, planning, architecture, engineering and the wider built environment.

For The Great North, that question is particularly relevant. If the region succeeds in accelerating investment, understanding whether the industry has the right people, with the right skills, in the right places to deliver that pipeline becomes just as important as attracting the capital itself.

What doesn't change

The fundamentals that investors and employers actually price in remain untouched; a population of more than 15.6 million of which 4.5million are under 25 years of age; 618,000 students across 31 universities, more than any other UK region which is producing around 220,000 graduates a year, including 120,000 in STEM (per the 2025 launch figures; the partnership's newer material restates only the STEM subset).

The North still generates 50% of England's renewable energy capacity, though that hasn't yet translated into lower energy costs for Northern businesses, which continue to pay close to the UK average. Independent analysis still puts the growth prize at up to £118bn a year by 2050. The launch told the world the North's moment had arrived. A year on, with the North's own voice in Andy Burnham leading the country, the job remains focused on delivery.

Grab our condensed report here

Sources: The Great North launch brochure (2025) and thegreatnorth.org.uk; UK government announcements, 20 July – 6 August 2026; public reporting on the Makerfield by-election and the 2026 Greater Manchester mayoral by-election. NatWest’s £20bn Northern funding commitment, the £466bn Northern economy figure and 2026 Great North Run participation figures.

Thank you to our contributors: Maria Sinclair - Managing Director; UK and Una McGuinness - Fractional Chief Marketing Officer