Rolls-Royce is to put £300 million into its British factories at Derby, Bristol, Glasgow and Rotherham, John Healey announced in his first Labour Party conference speech as Chancellor of the Exchequer, presenting the commitment as evidence of returning confidence in British industry.
The Chancellor tied the announcement to the city where the company’s aero engine business has its roots. “In Derby, where they made the Spitfire engines, Rolls-Royce now build nuclear reactors and put the UK at the front,” he said, describing the investment as part of what he called a new age of industrialisation and a new confidence in Britain lit by the government.
Alongside it he announced a £100 million Local Apprenticeship Service fund for mayors to expand apprenticeship provision in their areas, and cited six billion pounds of government contracts for British shipbuilding.
Rolls-Royce holds a position in British defence that few other companies come close to, and its Derby operation at Raynesway designs and builds the pressurised water reactors that power every Royal Navy submarine, work that is expanding for the Dreadnought ballistic missile boats and the SSN-AUKUS attack submarines to follow them, and the site has been through a substantial expansion of its own in recent years with government support. The company’s small modular reactor business, selected in 2025 as the technology partner for Great British Energy’s nuclear programme, draws on the same engineering base.
Bristol is home to the company’s defence aerospace operation, which covers the LiftSystem for the F-35B, the EJ200 that powers the Typhoon and work feeding into the Global Combat Air Programme. Glasgow at Inchinnan and Rotherham both sit within the wider manufacturing network, with Rotherham a centre for advanced manufacturing research alongside the University of Sheffield.
The Chancellor set the announcement within an argument about young people and work, telling delegates that the best thing that can be offered to a young person is not a benefit payment but a first job, and that he refuses to write off a million young people. The Alan Milburn review, he said, had laid bare the scale of the challenge, with the number not in employment, education or training having risen to close to a million and two thirds of them never having worked.
Healey represents Rawmarsh and Conisbrough, and returned repeatedly to the coalfield history of his own area, describing the miner’s lamp on his shelf at home as having come from Cortonwood Colliery, where the miners’ strike began, and noting that the last pit in the area at Silverwood closed in 1994. “The jobs went away. Hope and opportunity went too,” he said, recalling that one in three men in the area were unemployed.
Well done Rolls, but what is it to do with Healey? Answer, nothing.