Only a handful of “investment zones” will be approved in next week’s Budget, as Liz Truss’s flagship policy is retooled to support Rishi Sunak’s tech agenda.
Truss wanted to introduce as many as 200 of the low-tax, low-regulation sites across the country in a demonstration of the government’s “levelling-up agenda” designed to narrow regional inequalities.
But Jeremy Hunt, the UK chancellor, has decided to scale back the plans sharply and is taking a more traditional Treasury approach by aiming to use the scheme to “catalyse” a limited number of growth clusters around research bases such as universities.
