King's College London

With Andy Burnham as new Prime Minister, he has the chance to make good on his promise of “good growth in every postcode” by revising the UK’s Modern Industrial Strategy so that it does not further deepen the spatial or social inequalities that structure local labour markets across the UK. Evidence from the Gender Equality Index UK shows why this matters: no local authority in the country has reached gender parity, and Greater Manchester’s stalled gender equality reflects a wider pattern of uneven local labour markets, driven by what work is available and valued.

Here, Caitlin Schmid from the King’s Global Institute for Women’s Leadership, King’s College London and Eva Herman and Mathew Johnson from the Work and Equalities Institute, University of Manchester argue that simply rolling over the UK’s Modern Industrial Strategy may not deliver a step change in productivity or decent work for women and men alike. Using Greater Manchester as a case study they argue for a greater focus on the ‘foundational economy’. Key points they raise are:

• The eight priority sectors (IS-8) are disproportionately male-dominated and concentrated in London and the South East but even in a city-region like Greater Manchester, where several IS-8 sectors have a foothold, they often deliver poor-quality, precarious work.

• The strategy overlooks the foundational economy including care, retail, education and hospitality, which employs more people nationally than any single priority sector, representing a missed opportunity for growth.

• Going forward, Burnham should build a gender-sensitive Foundational Economy Strategy that directs investment into foundational sectors – building on his own long-standing commitment to social care – and improves working conditions there, while treating geographic and gender inequality as two sides of the same coin.

Introduction

Burnham entered No.10 this week as the first PM to have run a devolved city-region, and the coming months will see his ‘Manchesterism’ – sharing growth, opportunities and democratic power across communities – scaled up to national government. With stagnating productivity and widening regional inequalities, pressure is mounting on Burnham to devise a strategy that fuels growth evenly across the UK. Part of this will come from rebalancing spending across regions while capitalising on cities like Manchester, which has seen higher rates of productivity increase over the past decade than any city outside London.

From the Starmer government he inherits the 2025 UK’s Modern Industrial Strategy, intended as a “10-year plan to increase business investment and grow the industries of the future”. It identifies eight priority sectors (IS-8) for public backing: advanced manufacturing, clean energy, creative industries, defence, digital and technology, financial services, life sciences, and professional and business services.

Growth for whom, where and under what conditions?

These sectors are framed as the UK’s areas of comparative advantage, expected to carry the next decade of growth. Yet, they are also disproportionately male-dominated: women make up only around 28% of manufacturing employment, under 17% of the engineering and technology workforce, and 20% of IT professionals; the share of women in financial services is closer to 43%, though this masks significant stratification by seniority. Nor are these sectors evenly distributed across the UK: London alone hosts around a third of all jobs in the IS-8, while Manchester, by contrast, holds only 3.8%.

Where those sectors do have a foothold in Greater Manchester, the picture shows that job availability does not necessarily translate into job quality. The creative industries are an emblematic case: MediaCityUK based around Salford Quays is a TV, film, and gaming cluster that the government is happy to cite as evidence the strategy is working outside London. But entry-level jobs are difficult to access without financial and social capital, and work is often freelance, project-based and short-contract. The Creative Industries Policy and Evidence Centre’s 2025 freelancer survey found median freelance pay of £12.23 an hour in 2023 – a third below the national median – alongside a 37% gender pay gap among freelancers that widened to 48% for those with 21 to 30 years’ experience. Sectoral growth without job quality improvements does not “lift all boats”.

The Gender Equality Index UK, which tracks outcomes across UK local authorities, puts this in context. No local authority has reached gender parity, and the widest gaps everywhere sit in unpaid care – a pattern the OECD and International Labour Organization have linked to reduced labour force participation. Beneath the headline gaps, the index also identifies places where narrow gaps mean both women and men are falling behind together – a pattern labelled “Equal Erosion”. It applies to seven of Greater Manchester’s ten boroughs: Bolton, Manchester, Oldham, Rochdale, Salford, Tameside and Wigan. This shows what's at stake: across most of Greater Manchester, an economy organised around the wrong sectors is failing almost everyone and investment in the foundational economy, care above all, is the most direct lever available to change that.

The importance of the foundational economy

Beyond this, the deeper problem is what the strategy leaves out. Most people in Greater Manchester do not work in defence or fintech but in care, retail, hospitality, education and the utilities. These industries make up ‘the foundational economy’: work that is feminised, place-based, and structurally incapable of being offshored, because the point of production is the point of consumption. The foundational economy employs more than 40% of the UK workforce and more than any single IS-8 sector. Health and social care alone employ around 5 million people nationally, comfortably more than professional, scientific and technical activities (2.9 million) or financial and related professional services (nearly 2.5 million) – the largest of the sectors the UK Modern Industrial Strategy 2025 has chosen to back.

The strategy does already contain a concept of “foundational” sectors it is committed to protecting as the physical supply chains that feed the IS-8: steel, ports, chemicals, construction and critical minerals. Again, these are heavily male-dominated industries, though from a devolution perspective their inclusion could still be read as a positive step toward reviving former industrial hubs. What is consequential is the failure to extend that same definition to health, education, childcare and social care. Together with hospitality and retail, these are the sectors where most women in Greater Manchester are employed and where significant untapped economic potential remains. This potential goes largely unrealised since these jobs remain among the lowest paid in the economy.

The conventional explanation for low pay in the foundational economy is that this work is "low skilled" and "low productivity", but its economic contribution is far from marginal: health and education alone account for around 6% of England’s Gross Value Added and 8% of its employment. The real barrier to productivity gains in this ‘high touch’ work is structural: care roles are hard to make more 'productive' without overloading caseloads or relying on unpaid extra hours. A better explanation for persistently low pay is the gendered pay norms attached to caring work, compounded by decades of underinvestment in public services.

Research from the Open University shows that investing in care could generate more total employment than equivalent investment in construction, with the largest gains for women but strong gains for men too, even when care wages are matched to construction sector wages. This speaks directly to Greater Manchester's pattern of “Equal Erosion”, where both sexes stand to gain. Modelling from the International Labour Organization reaches a similar conclusion at a global scale, estimating that expanding childcare, long-term care and paid care leave could create close to 300 million jobs by 2035. Leaving care outside the UK's priority sectors is both a fairness gap and a missed opportunity for growth.

Lessons from Manchester

As mayor, Burnham introduced several initiatives to improve employment conditions in low-paid sectors, including the development of the Greater Manchester Good Employment Charter, a voluntary initiative co-designed with trade unions, employers and civil society. The Charter is built around seven dimensions of good employment, including secure work, flexible work, and the Real Living Wage. Since its launch in 2020, more than 160 organisations have joined the scheme. In 2021, Burnham also pledged to make Greater Manchester a Real Living Wage City-Region, aiming to increase the number of accredited employers to 650 by 2024. Because local government has limited powers to regulate employment, Burnham relied largely on persuasion and voluntary engagement while linking both schemes to public procurement and targeting low-paying foundational sectors through dedicated working groups.

As Prime Minister, Andy Burnham now has the statutory and fiscal levers that a mayor never did: the power to embed these same principles directly into the UK’s Modern Industrial Strategy 2025 itself. More broadly, he has the chance to reformulate the strategy into a place-based, gender-sensitive Foundational Economy Strategy that takes care, devolution and decent work as seriously as growth. There is cause for optimism: he spearheaded Labour's 2010 attempt to build a National Care Service and recently reaffirmed the urgency of fixing social care. Whether a Prime Minister who spent ten years arguing for a different kind of economics can shift that from the inside is the question his economic policy will soon come to answer.

This article was co-authored by Caitlin Schmid (King's College London), Eva Herman and Mathew Johnson (University of Manchester).