Beyond collaboration: Building cross-sector partnerships that last

One year into the UK’s Industrial Strategy, attention is turning from ambition to delivery. Oliver Holbourn, CEO of the National Wealth Fund, reflects on the cross-sector partnerships needed to unlock investment in places, support sustainable growth and build resilience that lasts beyond political and economic cycles.

Key insights:

• Resilient partnerships depend on clarity of purpose, alignment of incentives and consistent decision-making, not goodwill alone.
• Converting vision into investible propositions is one of the most persistent barriers to place-based growth; closing that gap requires embedding investment expertise directly in places.
• Public capital must be deployed flexibly and with proportionate risk, building market confidence to crowd in private finance that would not otherwise be there.

What enduring partnerships require

As economic conditions, geopolitical dynamics, and policy priorities shift at an unprecedented pace, the question of whether to collaborate effectively across sectors is no longer a matter of choice. The more pressing question is how to create partnerships that survive beyond the cycles that shape them.

For partnerships to endure in a more volatile world, they need to be built on clarity of purpose, alignment of incentives and trust in how decisions are made. When opportunities are not clearly aligned with government priorities, private capital can hesitate. When they are aligned, confidence grows, and delivery accelerates. Resilient partnerships, therefore, depend on institutions acting consistently and with certainty over time.

Partnerships must move away from short-term, transactional arrangements toward long-term relationships with clarity of purpose, stable pipelines and genuine co-ownership of risk and benefit.

Making place-based growth investable

To revitalise local economies over the long term, we need our towns and cities to fulfil their potential. It goes without saying that no two communities are the same, and all too often, what works well in one place might fall flat in another. Commercial, financial or delivery capability, as well as differing political and investment cycles, are often bottlenecks to progress, and we also see that many places face challenges in converting vision and strategy into deliverable projects.

Tackling this problem requires working with local, regional, and business leaders to understand what each community needs, recognise its strengths, and use them to unlock local investment. We know that across the country, places have well-recognised, evidence-based strategies for growth, building on established strengths from advanced manufacturing to clean energy.

That requires a different discipline, one grounded in evidence, financial clarity and governance, applied with an understanding of what each community already has and what it needs.

The NWF’s Regional Project Accelerator is the organisation’s direct response to this challenge, embedding investment experts within combined mayoral authorities in Greater Manchester, West Yorkshire and the West Midlands, as well as the Glasgow City Region, to act as trusted advisors on pipeline prioritisation, project development and commercial strategy. Already, an ambition has been set to deploy £500 million into Greater Manchester over the next five years, with opportunities identified across transport, place-based regeneration and clean energy. The model has scope for replicability elsewhere, and the communities behind it — the people whose jobs, public services and local environments depend on investment reaching them — are the true measure of whether it succeeds.

Deploying public capital for maximum impact

A core part of the NWF’s focus is building market confidence and taking proportionate risk to crowd in private capital that would not be there without it.

A recent transaction illustrates the point. The NWF provided a £350 million guarantee to enable Lloyds to deliver up to £500 million in loans to the higher education sector to retrofit UK universities. University campuses are complex built environments - Georgian terraces alongside 1960s brutalism alongside state-of-the-art modern facilities - and university finances are constrained. They need longer tenors and more flexible financing than commercial banks typically offer. The guarantee enables Lloyds to offer loans that could help modernise up to 300 campus buildings, stimulating a retrofit supply chain that could support up to 4,000 jobs.

This is what targeted, flexible public finance can achieve when directed at genuine market gaps: not quick wins, but structural change that unlocks private capital and builds long-term economic resilience.

Collaboration and impact: two sides of the same commitment

Looking ahead, with £10 billion now committed, the NWF is pledging to deploy capital across a range of sectors and geographies, while committing to turn a profit for the taxpayer. The ambition is to mobilise more than £100 billion in finance by the end of 2030/31, create and support more than 200,000 jobs, and save 500 million tonnes of CO₂ emissions by 2050.

Yet those ambitions cannot be achieved through capital alone. Every aspect of the NWF’s Strategic Plan and almost all of its investments to date speak to the power of collaboration. This collaborative spirit is one of the most important levers we can pull to create the right conditions for success, and it is an attitude that I hope to deeply engrain in my time leading this organisation.

We work with a wide range of stakeholders, including partnerships across the wider public finance landscape, from UK Export Finance to the British Business Bank. Together, we are working to identify and develop the best economic growth and clean energy opportunities while implementing a ‘one front door’ approach. This means that any prospective client can reach out to any organisation and quickly find the right help behind the scenes, or we come back with a rapid no, which can be just as valuable.

This is how lasting impact can be achieved: by embodying the spirit of cross-sector collaboration and working towards a shared vision that makes a real difference to people’s lives.

This thought leadership article is part of WIG's Members' Perspective series, featuring real-world insights and examples of how our members from business, government and civil society are tackling shared policy challenges through cross-sector collaboration for the UK's long-term economic growth and social prosperity. 

Join us in our upcoming policy dialogue events to engage directly with senior leaders and policymakers shaping the UK's agenda on Industrial Strategy and growth.