Why not knowing what Britain makes is holding us back

Britain is talking seriously about reindustrialisation again. But do we know our own industrial capabilities well enough to decide what to retain, what to build and where to invest?

In 1940, Britain had to answer a version of that question and found it couldn't. Government set up an Industrial Capacity Committee, working through regional boards and local knowledge to find unused and latent capacity across the country. Eighty years later we are asking it again, with vastly better tools and far less urgency.

Rob Gilbert argues that we still can't answer it well enough, and that this is a state capacity problem rather than a data one. He explains why deployment investment doesn't automatically create domestic industrial capability, and what better industrial intelligence would mean for four things: spending public money more precisely, commercialising British innovation, attracting international manufacturers, and connecting productive capabilities across sectors that we currently treat as separate.

Along the way: the closure of the UK's last continuous filament glass fibre plant in Wigan, the government's Global Supply Chains Intelligence Programme, and a surgical robotics exercise that found twenty-nine times as many relevant British businesses as conventional analysis.

Britain cannot manufacture everything. It has to choose. But those choices only work if we understand what this country can already make, and what it could make next.

How We Build Britain explores how Britain can rebuild its industrial strength through energy, infrastructure, investment and production.

Transcript

Speaker: 0:02

In the summer of 1940, Britain had just been pushed off the at Dunkirk. France was falling, and this country urgently needed to how much more it could produce from the industrial capacity had at home. And the reality was that Whitehall could not answer that nearly well enough. So the government went looking. That year it established an industrial capacity committee. Its task was described at the time as marrying industrial to supply needs. Regional organizations drew on local industrialists and trade unionists because they were the people who actually knew whether factories had spare capacity, which machines were and which businesses were already running flat out. They looked for machinery, factories and skills that could be turned towards the things that Britain urgently needed. They did all of that with telephones, paper records, and local knowledge, because mobilising productive capacity had being an abstract economic question, it had become a question of survival. Thankfully, we don't face anything like that today. But if Britain is serious about reindustrialization, there is a lesson in it, because we are once again trying to work out this country can produce and where we should deliberately industrial capacity and capability. And based on my own experience, I know we would still to answer those questions properly, despite having infinitely better technology than they had in 1940. today. But first, a quick word for anyone new. I'm Rob Gilbert. I've spent nearly 20 years working in energy, industry, and across the public and private sectors. I started my career in textile manufacturing, and one of my jobs was helping to offshore some of the last remnants great British industry. I've spent much of my career since asking versions of the question. Why don't we value industry more in this country? Today I'm a partner at Beringa, currently on Secondment Government, where I lead the design and delivery of Great Energy's £1 billion supply chain investment programme. This podcast is my own production. I'm not speaking here for government, for Great British or for Beringa. The premise is simple. Generations of deindustrialization have damaged our society, and increasingly our security. We need to change course. This podcast and its guests explore how. If you find this podcast useful, please subscribe wherever get your podcasts. the last episode, I argued that if Britain is serious about we have to make choices. We cannot manufacture everything, and we shouldn't try. So I set out four tests for deciding where we should concentrate our effort. And trying to apply those tests in practice, I've hit a fairly fundamental problem. Two of them I don't think we can properly answer today. The first is where Britain genuinely holds a technological or engineering advantage. And the second is where we already have industrial capability to build on. And by capability, I mean the companies, factories, equipment, and people producing the parts, components, and products we if we are going to build a genuinely competitive industry here in the UK. I've spent the last few years trying to work out within the system where Britain should focus public capital to support the supply chain. And it's through that experience that I've come to realise how wide that information gap can be. Because the way that public finance generally works means you normally begin by proving that something is missing. A market failure, a constraint on deployment, a critical that isn't going to arrive in time, or a capability this simply doesn't have anymore. That works, sort of, if your job is to design a grant But if your ambition is to build an industry, create a cluster, or work out where Britain could become internationally the absence of something is nowhere near enough information. You need to know what is already there, what's underused, could grow, what could move from serving one industry into and what might disappear before anybody notices it mattered. Some of the questions sound almost absurdly basic. What specialist skills sit in one particular factory or one place? How much capacity is genuinely available? Which capabilities are internationally distinctive? I'm increasingly convinced we can't answer those questions well enough at the point where decisions actually get made. And this isn't simply a data problem. It's a question of state capacity, not analytical capacity. I mean the ability to hold a clear view about what this country intends to be able to make and to put money behind it. In 1940, the purpose was brutally clear. Today it isn't. We have to make choices about what capabilities matter, what want to retain, and what we want to build. That requires industrial intelligence. And this is the right time to get serious about it, because is back on the national economic agenda. We are deploying enormous amounts of capital into offshore grid infrastructure, transport, housing and defence. But there is an important distinction here. Deployment investment is not the same thing as industrial Money spent building things in Britain does not automatically become factories, equipment, skills, and productive Just look at our relative industrial decline compared with nations. And part of the challenge is that if we do not know where our existing capability sits, it becomes much harder to connect of that demand to British production and potential. that has five important consequences. The first is that we don't use public money as well as we Suppose we decide we want more of a particular energy manufactured here, the obvious intervention may be to a large new factory. And sometimes that is genuinely the answer. But suppose we already have 70% of the capability required across firms supplying aerospace, automotive, marine, and and gas. Perhaps several could enter the market with relatively modest investment in equipment, people or certification. And perhaps the real constraint is two missing links in a system that otherwise largely exists. That is a completely different intervention. Instead of asking how do we create this industry, you ask, what is missing from an existing industrial system that would allow it to become competitive? That is a more precise question, potentially a much cheaper and it means capital can be aimed at the actual point of need rather than defaulting to a large Tier 1 factory every time. But you can only make that judgment if you can see what's there. If you can't, the big new factory tends to win the argument it's visible and it's easy to explain. The second is that we struggle to commercialise our own I've been fairly critical in this series about parts of industrial policy, but our research and innovation base is world class. That isn't the weakness. The weakness is what happens next. Because invention isn't enough. The productive system has to be capable of absorbing the Imagine a spin-out with a working prototype and a funding It now needs somebody to make a thousand units to a tolerance on a timeline. If it can't find a British manufacturer capable of doing that in the window available, it will find somebody somewhere else. Then production moves, and over time supply relationships, and often more of the value follow it. What bothers me is that the capability may already exist here. The company just can't find it quickly enough. Compare that with China, where an entire infrastructure to connect a design to productive capacity. Marketplaces, sourcing agents, companies that will take a find a manufacturer, produce samples, and organize the China hasn't just built manufacturing capacity. It has built an interface through which the rest of the world can access that capacity. That discoverability is in itself a form of industrial and ours is weaker than it should be for a country with our strength. The third is that we make a weaker proposition to international manufacturers and investors. We often talk about inward investment as though the decision is mainly about land or tax incentives, or grants, or energy Those things matter enormously. And industrial intelligence doesn't make electricity cheaper or produce a grid connection on demand. But factories don't operate alone. They sit inside production systems. So imagine the difference between telling an international Britain has a proud engineering heritage and a strong which is roughly what every country says. And being able to say within a hundred miles of this site, are 40 companies with relevant capability. Twelve already meet your quality requirements. Six are doing something technically adjacent in another Three could expand within 18 months. Here are the skills, here is the research base, and here are gaps where Britain is prepared to invest alongside you. That isn't better information, that's an investment And in my own work, I have not always been able to make that Not because I don't think the businesses are there. Often I strongly suspect that they are, but reconstructing evidence to a standard you would put in front of an investment committee takes months. And investment decisions don't politely wait while government and its institutions assemble the information. Retention matters too. A manufacturer embedded in relationships with British engineers, and research institutions has more reason to here when the next decision comes around. The fourth is that we fail to connect capabilities across And this may be the biggest opportunity of all. We organize manufacturing into sectors automotive, aerospace, defence, nuclear. But that isn't how production works. An automated machining centre doesn't know its principal is aerospace. A specialist foundry isn't fundamentally an energy company or a defence company. It's a foundry. The underlying capability can often be used somewhere else. A company serving aerospace may have processes, quality systems, and materials experience relevant to nuclear. An oil and gas engineering business may have much of the and sub-sea knowledge offshore wind requires. That doesn't make moving between sectors easy. The economics still have to work, but productive capability you somewhere to start. And this is one thing those wartime regional organizations instinctively. They weren't primarily asking which sector a factory to, they were asking what it could do and what else it could Industrial strategy needs to become much better at asking the same question across the modern productive economy. together, those four problems create another risk. We can lose industrial capability without ever establishing it was worth. Last summer, electric glass fibre closed its plant at Hindley Green in Wigan. Around 250 jobs were lost. It was described by the industry body British Glass as the only producer of continuous filament glass fibre products, material used in things like wind turbines, vehicles, rail, aerospace. Its owner faced very real commercial problems, energy and raw material costs, logistics, and intense Chinese competition. Better industrial intelligence alone would not have factory profitable. But the government found itself involved in rescue efforts the loss of a unique domestic capability against the the plant was already heading towards closure. That is not the moment to be working out what something is The point of industrial intelligence isn't to give the a reason to save every factory, it is to understand the of a capability to the national productive system. this is where researching this episode changed my own view, thankfully, there is more happening inside government than I appreciated. Since 2021, the government has run the Global Supply Chains Program, GSCIP. It was created partly because government departments kept mapping supply chains, taking months, producing something and then having to start again later. I know this because I wrote one of those reports for government in 2024. GSCIP instead links government, commercial, and open to map relationships between companies, products, suppliers, and locations. And the number that really caught my attention came from a robots use case that they published. The baseline approach identified around 50 verified of interest. GSCIP identified around 1,450. 29 times as many. That is what a data blind spot looks like. And there is an interesting connection back to 1940. Those regional organizations found unused and by going into factories, talking to people, and building up knowledge. We can now begin to do something similar across an entire using modern data. So, Britain does have sophisticated supply chain and the government has already started building on it. The Department for Business, Innovation, Science and launched a new supply chain centre to act as a cross-government hub. Its plans include identifying UK producers, connecting with suppliers, strengthening domestic capacity, and public finance institutions, including the National British Business Bank, and UK Export Finance. And I can hopefully add Great British Energy to that list. Alongside that, the high value manufacturing catapult has building the UK supply chain directory to improve British manufacturing capabilities. Those are real green shoots. But I think the organizing question still needs to widen. Because supply chain resilience asks, what do we depend where are we exposed? But reindustrialization asks, what can Britain do? What could Britain do next? And what should we deliberately build? The evidence overlaps, but the purpose is different. So the task now is to create an industrial intelligence a shared picture, connecting national supply chain to what is happening in actual factories, and connecting knowledge directly to investment, procurement, and inward decisions. In the last episode, I said Britain cannot manufacture In 1940 it wasn't a choice. It was about putting planes in the air, ships at sea, and a population fed, clothed and housed. Our generation has the opportunity to choose. But the four tests only work if somebody knows the answers, a view about them, and has the capital to do something about Which is why I've come to think industrial intelligence isn't a nerdy data exercise sitting on the edge of industrial It is one of the preconditions for having one at all. And I want to end on the optimistic version. We tend to talk about British industry in the language of I've certainly been guilty of that on this podcast. Too much about what we've lost, what we no longer make, what used to be. I hope we never face a crisis that makes industrial an obligation, but we should learn from that wartime Because right across this country there are industrial with equipment, people, knowledge and capabilities that may a step or two, and some focus and investment away from the next generation of British industry. My suspicion is that if we looked properly at what Britain can do, we would find considerably more than we currently is there. But we'll only find it if we go looking, and it will only if having found it, we're organized enough to do something it. Reindustrialisation is a genuine national discussion again. It's time we understood what we have to compete with and on that. Thank you.