Make UK has restated its demands to the newly established Labour government to create a joined-up industrial vision. If ignored, Make UK claims there is a risk of losing billions of pounds in investment abroad.
Make UK claim the UK can compete globally on innovation, as long as there is a joined-up strategy on tech, robotisation, renewable energies and training.
“I have lots of chief executives from international companies coming into my office and telling me they have billions to invest and that the UK is a candidate but they are not investing anything unless they know what the plan is,” said the head of Make UK, Stephen Phipson, speaking before a meeting on Wednesday with the Chancellor, Rachel Reeves.
Phipson intends to press Reeves to fix damage done by Lord Frost's trade and cooperation agreement with the EU.
“The trade deal was the worst possible deal we could get as an industrial country. It is a disaster and continues to be a disaster,” Phipson said to The Guardian, blaming the previous Tory government for “fundamental errors” in the trade deal it sealed.
Phipson claims that the UK has not had an ambitious industrial plan since 2010, when the Catapult Networks were unveiled involving a nationwide series of research and development centres to provide the technological support and specialists for manufacturing innovation.
Phipson says that the stability fell through when Kwasi Kwarteng, former Chancellor of the Exchequer in 2022, replaced the scheme with “a short advanced manufacturing plan” that did “not give anyone certainty”. This left the UK with the lowest use of robots in Europe and just one battery plant, despite the growing climate policies to transition to sustainable sources, Phipson added.
“If you go back to 2010 when we created the catapults, we created the biggest commercial aerospace component provider in the world,” he said, referring to Airbus in Broughton, north Wales. “We are now the world’s leader in advanced materials and all because the industrial strategy was brilliantly successful at putting us at the top 10 in the world,” said Phipson.
He said industry was going through an “enormous transition” to meet climate targets but the government was not doing enough to help them deliver.
Other big changes were needed to address Brexit, which had been a “disaster” for manufacturing, Phipson said.
EU trade deals use “diagonal cumulation” clauses that allow components processed in a third country such as Japan that are then exported to the bloc to still be considered to have originated in the EU.
The failure to include such an arrangement in the Brexit deal he said was killing cross-border production industries.
“I think the problem we had with the Boris Johnson lot was they completely didn’t understand that most of our trade is intermediary products and not finished products. That is a fundamental error. Rules of origin are critical to UK manufacturing. So we’re completely and utterly ignored in terms of where we are,” Phipson said.
“Data since Brexit shows volumes are up but the real key data point is the number of products we export has fallen by 80% which implies that it is the small and medium enterprises that have stopped exporting to the EU,” Phipson said.
He suggested “the right thing would be a return to the EU’s customs union”, but Labour had ruled out that option.
Make UK will tell Reeves that industry also need other fixes such a deal on mutual recognition of professional qualifications including service engineers, regulatory alignment and customs simplification.
