00Introduction
The Government’s new Industrial Strategy has set out priorities for public investment both in terms of sectors and places. But beyond name-checking some areas that have perceived concentrations of these industries, there are no detailed insights on where in the country these sectors are, and so how relevant the Industrial Strategy is to different parts of the country.
Using data from The Data City (see Box 1 for the methodology), this briefing sets out the geography of the eight chosen sectors (IS-8) and what this means for the implementation of the strategy.
Box 1: Methodology
This briefing uses firm-level data from The Data City (TDC). TDC classifies businesses by both Real-Time Industry & Sector Classifications (RTICs) and Real-Time Standard Industrial Classifications (RSICs) codes1. Specifically designed to group firms in emerging sectors, RTICs provide a more precise overview than that which can be gleaned from the official Standard Industrial Classification (SIC). RSICs are constructed using AI to update SIC codes with real-time data, so they are more reflective of the actual business activities of each firm.
Each firm’s RTIC or RSIC classification is done by ‘web-scraping’ of words from company websites. This data is then matched with Companies House records to verify businesses and their registered addresses. Centre for Cities allocate them to locations based on their registered address.
This analysis defines the frontier industries of IS-8 by matching the Government definition2 with TDC data. It uses all SIC codes when the Government assigns them to an industry. But it supplements the definitions with RTIC when there are no appropriate SIC codes or when the RTICs match well with an industry.