Future Mobility & Advanced Manufacturing

Britain retains a serious manufacturing base with an unusually strong applied research estate around it. The mission is transition: batteries, electrification, digital production and the supply chains beneath them.

• Supply chains retained and rebuilt in Britain
• Faster adoption of automation by mid-sized manufacturers
• Higher-value manufacturing employment

Comparable in function to the Mittelstand-plus-Fraunhofer model in southern Germany.

• Existing automotive, aerospace and rail supply chains.
• High Value Manufacturing Catapult centres embedded with industry.
• Established engineering and technician skills base.

Current geographic hypothesis: Distributed. Core capability concentrates around the West Midlands, Sheffield and Rotherham, the Nottingham–Derby corridor, the North East, Teesside and the Central Belt.. This is indicative geography — a record of where relevant capability is concentrated today, not a decision that this mission belongs to one place or that anything would be built there.

• Warwick Manufacturing Group and UKBIC
• AMRC Rotherham
• Nissan and the North East automotive cluster
• Rolls-Royce and the Derby engineering base

The types of organisation and individual already active in this capability. Listing a participant type is a description of the ecosystem, not membership, endorsement or a commitment by anyone named or implied.

• Manufacturers and tier-one suppliers
• Automation and robotics companies
• Skills providers
• Industrial and infrastructure capital

• Batteries and electrification
• Automotive and rail technology
• Aerospace manufacturing
• Digital and automated production

• University of Warwick
• University of Sheffield
• Loughborough University
• University of Strathclyde

• Battery and gigafactory capability
• Demonstration and pilot lines
• Testing and homologation
• Grid capacity at industrial sites

Listing infrastructure is not a proposal to build it. Physical intervention is only recommended where evidence demonstrates additionality.

1. Research→
2. Problem→
3. Prototype→
4. Company→
5. Capital→
6. Customer→
7. Scale→
8. Export

• Supply chains retained and rebuilt in Britain
• Faster adoption of automation by mid-sized manufacturers
• Higher-value manufacturing employment

These are hypotheses to be tested, not forecasts, targets or guarantees. Each would need to pass the additionality test — would it happen anyway, or happen elsewhere in Britain? — before it counts as a reason to intervene. UKIZ makes no projections it cannot evidence.