Devolution has moved from a talking point to one of the clearest signals of where public money and decision-making will sit for the next decade. With the current government continuing to put greater emphasis on devolving power and funding to local leaders, the machinery for doing exactly that, Local Growth Plans, has taken on real momentum.
For anyone bidding into local and regional public sector work, understanding how these plans work is quickly becoming as important as understanding a national framework.
We're often asked where the next wave of regional opportunity is likely to come from. Local Growth Plans won't answer that question on their own, but they're one of the best places to start looking.
What are Local Growth Plans?
A Local Growth Plan is a ten-year strategic framework produced and owned by a Mayoral Strategic Authority. Each plan sets out an economic overview of the region, a set of "shared priorities" agreed with central government and, crucially for suppliers, an investment pipeline highlighting some of the region's most significant growth opportunities.
The legal position has also moved on. The English Devolution and Community Empowerment Act 2026 now provides for a statutory Local Growth Plan duty for mayoral combined authorities and mayoral combined county authorities. The Greater London Authority is excluded from that specific requirement, although London remains part of the wider framework around shared local growth priorities.
There's no fixed template. Some plans will lean heavily on housing and regeneration, others on innovation clusters, skills or transport connectivity, depending on what each region's economy actually needs. What they have in common is the ambition to bring existing strategies and investment decisions together into a clearer regional framework.
Greater Manchester's plan, for example, describes this as a "plan of plans", bringing together existing strategies and investment priorities into a single long-term picture.
How they connect to funding
Local Growth Plans aren't just narrative documents. They can help shape how devolved funding, local powers and central government support are directed around the priorities each region has identified.
One particularly relevant funding stream is the new Local Growth Fund. More than £900 million has been allocated across four years to 11 Mayoral Strategic Authorities:
- East Midlands
- Greater Lincolnshire
- Greater Manchester
- Hull and East Yorkshire
- Liverpool City Region
- North East
- South Yorkshire
- Tees Valley
- West Midlands
- West Yorkshire
- York and North Yorkshire
The funding is intended to support local growth priorities including enabling infrastructure, regeneration, business growth and wider projects capable of unlocking economic development.
It's worth keeping the two things separate. The Local Growth Fund is targeted at those 11 areas, whereas Local Growth Plans form part of a wider devolution framework. A region does not need to be receiving Local Growth Fund money for its growth strategy to matter to suppliers.
The Local Growth Fund is also only one part of a much wider funding landscape. The House of Commons Library's summary of current local growth funding is a useful map of how different programmes fit together.
The political backdrop
It's hard to separate this shift from the change in Downing Street itself. The current Prime Minister has made devolution a defining theme of the government's early agenda, talking about putting power "into every postcode in the land" and adopting what's been described as a principle of devolving by default.
This follows on from a wider move towards devolution across recent governments. Successive reforms have given mayors and combined authorities greater responsibility for areas such as transport, skills, housing and economic development, and the 2026 legislation puts further weight behind that model.
We've covered what the wider political changes could mean in our piece on the Burnham government’s impact on public sector procurement, and in our look at the government's housing and infrastructure plans.
Local Growth Plans are, in many ways, where some of that wider ambition begins to become a regional investment programme.
Which regions to watch
Greater Manchester's Local Growth Plan is one of the more developed examples published so far, and it's a useful template for what a mature plan looks like in practice. It brings together the region's existing strategy documents, including its Sector Development Plans, into a single narrative, with an integrated investment pipeline covering housing, transport, regeneration and innovation investment across priority Growth Locations.
Beyond Greater Manchester, plans and updates from other mayoral authorities will continue to emerge, each shaped by their own regional strengths. Don't limit your monitoring to areas receiving Local Growth Fund allocations, though. Local Growth Plans form part of a wider devolution framework, so opportunities may emerge well beyond those 11 areas.
Government guidance on developing Local Growth Plans is particularly useful here because it explains what each authority is expected to include. If you're trying to understand what a buyer in a particular region is likely to prioritise before a tender is even published, these documents can provide useful early intelligence.
What this means for suppliers
The investment pipeline is where this gets concrete. Government guidance recommends that Local Growth Plans highlight between four and ten priority investment opportunities, selected from the authority's wider pipeline. These should be projects considered significant for unlocking regional growth and should have a credible prospect of delivery, including factors such as planning, delivery partners and enabling infrastructure.
That's a genuine gift for suppliers trying to build a credible medium-term pipeline of their own, because it can tell you where a region's biggest and most investable opportunities are likely to land before they reach the open market.
Rather than simply noting the project name, we'd suggest looking for five things:
- What is actually being delivered? Is it housing, transport, regeneration, digital infrastructure, business support or something else?
- When could it move into delivery? Look for planning status, funding milestones and expected timescales.
- Who is likely to buy it? This may be the Mayoral Strategic Authority itself, a constituent council, another public body or a delivery vehicle.
- Are delivery partners or major contractors already involved? That could point towards subcontracting and supply-chain routes as well as direct tenders.
- What route to market is likely? Existing frameworks, dynamic markets and major infrastructure contracts may all matter before a standalone tender ever appears.
Housing and regeneration are likely to feature heavily in many plans, particularly where enabling infrastructure and new development are central to regional growth. If you work in construction, remediation or regeneration, it's worth reading these alongside our coverage of council housebuilding programmes to understand how national and local ambitions are lining up.
Business support and innovation programmes may create a different set of opportunities, including for professional services, technology and smaller regional suppliers. Skills development will shape workforce capacity too, which is worth factoring into any bid where labour availability or subcontractor capacity is a genuine constraint.
How to track opportunities as they emerge
Because Local Growth Plans are locally owned and there's no single national publication schedule, staying on top of them means watching individual Mayoral Strategic Authority websites rather than waiting for one government announcement.
It's a similar discipline to the one we set out in our guide to finding and securing local council tenders and frameworks, just applied a level up at the combined authority or strategic authority level.
Once you've identified a priority project, don't stop with the Local Growth Plan itself. Look at cabinet and authority papers, procurement pipelines, planning applications, funding decisions and early market engagement notices. The plan tells you where the investment is intended to go. Those other sources can tell you how it is beginning to reach the market.
There's also a wider focus on supporting UK businesses and domestic supply chains across current government policy. For regional procurements, buyers may also place weight on outcomes such as employment, skills, local supply-chain development and social value where these are relevant to the contract and reflected in the procurement documents.
That doesn't mean a local supplier automatically has an advantage. The stronger approach is to understand the outcomes the buyer is trying to create and evidence how your delivery model can contribute to them.
How Thornton & Lowe can help
Regional procurement can be harder to track than national frameworks simply because it's more fragmented, and that's exactly where a bit of structure pays off.
At Thornton & Lowe, we help suppliers build a genuine pipeline view across the regions that matter to them, rather than reacting to opportunities only once they're advertised. If Local Growth Plans are starting to shape where your target buyers are investing, we can help you understand what that means for your bid strategy and how to position early.
Our Tender Pipeline tool is also worth using to keep track of live and upcoming opportunities as individual authorities bring their plans to market.
