Author: Paul O’Donnell, Engineering and Manufacturing Alliance (EAMA)
The Government’s long awaited Industrial Strategy was launched on Monday. It is accompanied by five of the Sector Plans including one for Advanced Manufacturing which contains the subsectors (now called frontier industries) Automotive, Aerospace, Batteries, Space, Advanced Materials & Agri-Tech.
The biggest headline from the launch, has focused on bringing down energy costs through a new British Industrial Competitiveness Scheme. This will only be available to schemes in the eight Industrial Strategy sectors and foundational industries in the supply chain. Consultation on eligibility will open ‘shortly’ and EAMA will make representations to ensure that our member companies are not overlooked.
In terms of investment in Advanced Manufacturing, the Government is pointing to a total of £4.3bn, £2.8bn of it in R&D, over the next five years. Nearly all of the this is in existing programmes. There is a commitment to fully roll out Made Smarter Adoption and fund it to the tune of £99m. There is also another £40m for Robotic Adoption Hubs.
The strategy also contains sections on taking advantage of AI to drive growth, reassuringly their definition of AI includes technologies like digital twins, predictive maintenance and generative design. The automotive section also leans heavily into autonomy, as well as electrification.
On skills, while foundation apprenticeships are portrayed as a big part of the solution, there is a recognition that other things will need to be funded too. There are two main commitments: to introduce new Technical Excellence Colleges to address shortage areas; and to fund new short courses to upskill the existing workforce. The former, will likely be based on existing FE provision. The second commitment, to fund more, shorter, courses out of the Levy is potentially very good news but it will depend on how much flexibility Skills England is prepared to grant to employers when it comes to deciding what sort of training is appropriate. Given that they want to roll these out from April 2026 it has to be assumed that they will at least be based on existing provision. It is not clear how these courses will interact with another new announcement, an Upskilling and Reskilling Programme, to be delivered online. There is also a welcome commitment to review the Apprenticeship funding bands.
The strategy also welcomes the launch of a Supply Chain Centre, which will review supply chains into the eight sectors in order to identify where there might be action needed to strengthen them from a national resilience point of view and potentially focus interventions like the National Wealth Fund and the British Business Bank accordingly. This is slated to complete an analysis by 2025.
Further details are likely to develop over time, but this important step represents a welcome move to acknowledge the importance of advanced manufacturing to the UK economy.