Over the last two weeks since we have been back in Parliament I have attended a very large number of meetings and receptions.

It’s a bit of a challenge juggling all of these, with duties in the chamber and raising issues with Ministers that are relevant to Camborne, Redruth and Hayle.

But one of the lesser-known ways of raising awareness of particular challenges and opportunities is the All Party Parliamentary Groups or APPGs.

These are, as the name suggests, regular meetings on certain subjects of interest with MPs from all political parties, members of the House of Lords and specialists in the subject areas. They’re a very useful way of learning about the subject matter very quickly. MPs normally choose to attend APPGs that are relevant to their own constituencies or previous experience.

So in the last two weeks I have attended APPGs on ocean health, electric vehicles, autism, net zero and critical minerals (tin and lithium being of particular interest). The industry-related APPGs have been fascinating. A similar overall theme has been clear: the total and utter lack of any discernible industrial strategy.

For over a decade the economy has been allowed to drift and follow the economic headwinds of whatever global issues blew into it: global recession, Brexit, the Covid pandemic, wars in Ukraine and the Middle East. This lack of any plan to steer our economy to our own national advantage has resulted in very little economic growth and eye-wateringly high inflation.

Although inflation has now thankfully fallen, prices in the shops are still incredibly high – they’re just not rising as fast as they were, and economic growth has been anaemic at best.

What businesses are crying out for is a clear direction of travel, a Government that will not change tack every time there is a global shock, invest in the industries of the future, provide stability and support keys areas of skills and a reduction in barriers to trade.

But the truth is that after over a decade of economic incompetence, the UK is well behind other countries in gaining a strong global footing in the industries of the future.

Whether it’s in the energy sector, where we are wholly over-reliant on foreign imports, sometimes from countries we’d really rather not be relying on, or domestically where there is simply too much foreign ownership of our core public utilities and transport systems. Labour’s new industrial strategy will have as a key focus on homegrown talent and domestic ownership.

The establishment of the multi-billion pound backed GB Energy, the taking back into public ownership of our railways and the placing into special measures the largely foreign owned water companies, are indicative of the direction of travel for this new Government.

And Cornwall has the potential to play a very big part. My MP colleagues and I have been working hard to raise awareness, through platforms such as the APPGs to ensure that our opportunities to create great new jobs and businesses in digital, renewables and critical minerals mean that we are ideally placed to play a big role in the delivery of this new industrial strategy.