Blog

Freeports are at the centre of the UK's post-Brexit industrial policy. While these Special Economic Zones (SEZs) encourage economic development, they also actively rework legal and institutional norms. Alexandra Hall explains how these rule-shifting governance arrangements fragment oversight, redistribute accountability and prioritise investor certainty.

This report examines the realities beneath the language of “levelling up”, competitiveness and renewal. It argues that UK freeports must be understood not simply as experimental economic tools, but as an increasingly common spatial strategy in which legal, political and institutional norms are selectively reworked.