While the British left debates electoral strategy, a quiet revolution is reshaping the country beneath our feet. In the wake of Brexit, the Conservatives began rolling out a network of designated free zones across Britain—eighty-six in total, made up of seventy-four Special Economic Zones (SEZ) and twelve Freeports.
That framework has continued to expand in the years since. In January 2025, Keir Starmer launched AI Growth Zones, with more than 200 site bids to date, extending deregulation into the digital sphere. By June that year, his government had drawn these initiatives together under a single banner, rebranding them as ‘Industrial Strategy Zones’.
Taken together, the direction of travel is unmistakable. Britain is being remade as an archipelago of private governance, where your rights depend on your postcode. In what I call ‘Zone Fever’, the country is being carved up into deregulated corporate enclaves.
The rationale for free zones can at first sound compelling. Supporters argue that these zones will attract investment and spur innovation by lifting tax and regulatory burdens said to inhibit growth. Tax breaks and planning freedoms, we are told, will generate jobs, revive struggling regions, and position Britain as a competitive post-Brexit economy, a vision of dynamic capitalism unshackled from red tape.
That’s the promise. The reality is far more troubling.
What Are Free Zones?
Special Economic Zones and Freeports are designated areas operating under different rules from the rest of the country. Originally sold as opportunities for economic growth, they offer corporations sweetheart deals: ten-year tax holidays, relaxed planning restrictions, and weakened environmental and labour protections. Some cover entire urban regions and even protected landscapes. These are vast territories being handed to private interests with minimal democratic oversight.
In contrast to traditional ports, which operate under established systems of port governance and local democratic oversight, Freeports are privately owned and governed through public-private partnerships structured in favour of corporate interests, often operating via Mayoral Development Corporations with compulsory purchase powers and minimal accountability to elected bodies.
Most people have never heard of this transformation. That is by design. When Labour rebranded Freeports as ‘Industrial Strategy Zones’ and systematically avoided the word ‘Freeport’ in official documents, it was a deliberate strategy. The rollout took place through secondary legislation, meaning no parliamentary debate, no public consultation, and no press notification.
The Free Zone Myth
The economic case rests on a simple assumption: reduce costs and investment will follow. But the Office for Budget Responsibility’s assessment cuts through this fantasy. Freeports are expected ‘to generate little additional activity, with most of it being displaced from other areas.’ Job displacement is a well-known feature of freeports, as companies shift operations a few miles to claim tax breaks while the Treasury loses revenue.
The evidence is damning. A 2024 House of Commons report found that Freeports created just 5,600 jobs, against a government projection of 214,000, a shortfall of up to 96 percent. Between 2021 and 2024, nearly £20 billion in public money went into Freeports and SEZs, chasing outcomes the OBR expects will never materialise.
At Teesside, the flagship Brexit Freeport, an original allocation of £25 million ballooned to £560 million. Promises of 18,000 jobs and £3.2 billion in economic growth remain fantasy. By contrast, 90 per cent of profits flow to private developers, while taxpayers fund the infrastructure.
Hollowing Out Democracy
Free zones operate as wealth-extraction mechanisms. The gravest damage, however, is to democratic governance itself. Mayoral Development Corporations wield compulsory purchase powers while remaining shielded from ordinary democratic control. Private consortia write the rules: a firm inside the boundary can trade tax-free for a decade, while its neighbour across the street pays in full. Both depend on the same roads and public infrastructure, yet only one funds it. For residents living nearby, the democratic loss is sharper still. They have no meaningful say over what is built, no recourse when Development Orders override established planning safeguards, and no power to remove the appointed leadership reshaping their communities.
This is not a Conservative policy Labour opposes. Both parties are invested, with Labour councils sitting on zone boards alongside their Tory counterparts, creating a consensus that risks rendering the transformation immune to electoral politics.
The revolving door between government and zone leadership reinforces this continuity, exemplified by former Labour Cabinet minister Patricia Hewitt’s move from the Blair and Brown cabinets to HSBC before becoming CEO of Thames Freeport. When employment rights, environmental protections and planning safeguards depend on which side of an invisible boundary you live, universal citizenship gives way to a postcode lottery of corporate governance. Across dozens of zones, democratic accountability has been thinned out and redistributed upwards with barely a whisper of public debate.
Towards Charter Cities
Freeports, SEZs, ISZs and AI Growth Zones are stepping stones towards Charter Cities, or ‘Free Cities’, as Trump calls them. Forest City 1 proposes building a city for ‘nearly one million of the UK’s most ambitious people’ on 45,000 acres of Suffolk farmland. Announced in late 2025, it is backed by Patricia Hewitt and a network of free market think tanks and pressure groups. Among its supporters is Patrik Schumacher of Zaha Hadid Architects, an advocate of ‘anarcho-capitalism’ who envisions fully privatised cities as ‘mini-polities’. He previously designed Próspera in Honduras, a charter city backed by Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen, where investors write laws, design courts and operate police forces.
The progression is clear. Freeports established the precedent; SEZs expanded it nationwide; Investment Zones consolidated the model; AI Growth Zones extended it into the digital sphere. Charter Cities would mark the next stage, completing the transfer of democratic governance to private interests.
Against the Takeover
These zones present themselves as inevitable. They are framed as technical economic policy beyond politics. They are not. They are fragile. They depend on public money, which can be withdrawn; on public legitimacy, which can be challenged; on political protection, which can be voted out; and on community acquiescence, which can become resistance. Between 2021 and now, this transformation has unfolded camouflaged by rebrands and bureaucratic opacity. Complexity is part of the strategy, because public scrutiny threatens the model.
The window for opposition has not yet closed. But it is closing. What happens next depends on whether we recognise what is being built before the concrete sets, or whether we wake up in an archipelago of corporate sovereignty, wondering how we got here.
David G. Powell is an artist and independent researcher documenting the UK’s free zone rollout.