The UK Defence Industry Strategy, published in September 2025, identifies the North East as one of the 12 UK High-Growth-Potential Frontier Industry Clusters. It notes the area's strengths in manufacturing, engineering, fabrication and digital technologies. It also highlights a strong advanced material electronics sector and a fast-growing space cluster. The UK Industrial Strategy's sector definitions list notes that the national standard industrial classification (SIC) system is too restrictive to precisely define the Defence sector. The list does highlight the SIC codes dedicated to defence manufacturing.
The North East Local Growth Plan includes Defence, Security and Space as one of its key sectors. Space is listed within the UK Industrial Strategy as a frontier industry of Advanced Manufacturing with links to Defence and to Digital and Technologies. Cybersecurity is a Digital and Technologies frontier industry. Both Space or Cybersecurity cannot be easily defined using the SIC system but private security and security system services can be.
This report includes annual data from the Ministry of Defence on their direct expenditure with industry in the broad North East region. It also includes estimates of the number of jobs that this expenditure supports and the numbers of service staff stationed in and originating from the broad region.
The report also has information from the Data City, a platform that analyses the websites of businesses registered with Companies House. This source uses alternative classifications to SIC codes. It provides estimates of the number of companies with sites in the North East and any involvement in the defence, space and cybersecurity sectors. It provides some estimates of local employment in these companies but these have to be modelled for sites in multisite companies, a process that is not yet complete. Hence, employee totals are indicative rather than definitive.
The ONS Business Register Employment Survey (BRES) provides more robust employment estimates for businesses that have a main purpose that can be defined using the SIC system. This report includes BRES estimates for manufacturing sub-sectors that are important for defence and for private security services. In the BRES data each business is only classified using one SIC code, unlike the Data City statistics where many businesses are classified in multiple subsectors.