Manufacturing in Crisis: The UK’s Fall and the Road Ahead
Examining the consequences for the fashion and textile industryBy Alix Coombs
Image: The manufacture of footwear for the Women's Royal Naval Service at a factory in the Midlands, 1944. Source: Royal Collection of the United Kingdom
UK manufacturing has fallen behind
This week, Make UK released their annual UK Manufacturing report, revealing that the UK has fallen out of the top 10 manufacturing countries for the first time since 2012.
Now in the 12th spot, the UK has fallen 4 places from 2023. In contrast, Mexico has jumped from 12th to 7th place, and Russia from 10th to 8th. The UK also trails behind our European counterparts, including Germany, Italy and France who are all in the top 10.
The decline of UK manufacturing since the 1990s, combined with increasing value being placed on the service industry has ultimately resulted in the UK slipping down the ladder. Despite manufacturing accounting for £217 billion of output for the UK and providing 2.6 million UK jobs, with wages an average of 10% higher than the rest of the economy, we have seen a continuing decline in the value placed on manufacturing.
As Kate Hills, Founder of Make it British, put it:
“Manufacturing has been totally neglected by a whole succession of governments. It's been pushed aside in favour of a service industry and it's decimated businesses and communities, and really it should be the backbone of the UK economy.”
What does this mean for fashion?
While the Make UK report fails to capture the impact of this on the fashion and textile sub-sector, small businesses and communities are certainly feeling the impact of the shrinking space.
Earlier this year, textile manufacturing firm Culimeta-Saveguard in the Greater Manchester area went into administration. The firm employed around 200 people and made technical textiles for the motor industry. It was also the parent company of the only cotton spinner left in the UK, English Fine Cottons. When it was established in 2016, English Fine Cottons invested £4.8 million in regenerating a former Victorian cotton mill, installing new technologies to create luxury yarn.
This loss of English Fine Cottons is indicative of not only the state of manufacturing in the UK, but also the state of local garment and textile industries. In a world where overseas sourcing and manufacturing have become necessary due to a lack of options locally, small brands and manufacturers are competing with thriving global brands such as Shein and Zara, in a battle they’re unlikely to ever win.
Fashion Roundtable and Kate Hills reached out to Jonathan Reynolds MP in March of this year to discuss what Labour was going to do about the loss of a manufacturer so critical to the supply chain, but the MP was unwilling to meet. He also did not return a request for comment on this article.
Jenny Holloway, fashion industry veteran, CEO of Fashion-Enter, and longtime advocate for local and ethical manufacturing, highlighted how losses like this all over the country have impacted workers in particular:
“When we started working in Leicester there were 1500 garment factories employing the best part of 15,000 skilled workers. Today there are 96 factories left. How on earth could we have let this happen? Leicester is a major manufacturing cluster, it currently has high unemployment, 2% higher than the national average, and retailers are crying out for newness and speed of response fashion.”
Jenny said the same situation can be seen in Manchester and London. Consumer demand for fast fashion has risen exponentially, pushing slower and more ethical brands, who manufacture locally, out of the space. Local brands simply can’t compete with countries like Bangladesh, where manufacturing wages are as low as 99p per hour.
The government’s role in revitalisation
Sadly, UK fashion is suffering and will continue to until Sir Keir Stamer’s newly formed government recognises the need to breathe life back into local industries with a solid industrial strategy that will prevent the future loss of businesses like Culimeta Saveguard, as well as protect and create jobs.
Kate Hills says that the government has a particularly important role to play, not only from a policy perspective but also as a direct supporter and customer of local manufacturers, especially fashion.
“I would love to see our government actually doing their own procurement in the UK. We used to make tonnes of uniform for our own military not only a decade ago, and now we don't make anything here. We haven't even got a government who source locally.”
In Fashion Roundtable’s Sector Vision Report from earlier this year we outlined a clear vision for the fashion industry. Key recommendations from the report that provide targeted support to the UK manufacturing industry include:
Greater support for on-shoring, a commitment to British made and a strengthening of public procurement.
Investment in UK manufacturing through consistent and secure orders.
Support for the UK as a place of decent work for garment workers.
Return to STEAM (science, technology, engineering, arts and math) education.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) and support of creative intellectual property (IP).
Entrepreneur, designer, and fashion industry critic Patrick Grant agrees that a focus on localisation is necessary to revitalise our manufacturing industry and protect against future crises:
“We need to rethink our approach to government spending. Prioritising local spending could have a key role to play in supporting the development of a stable manufacturing base in textiles, re-invigorate economies in some of the UK’s poorest regions, and provide resilience in time of global crisis such as covid, where our failure to have a plan B on critical supplies was painfully unmasked.”
Jenny Holloway has seen a rise in repairs and reprocessing, which is becoming a major part of the garment manufacturing industry and requires workers with unique and diversified skills. She calls for the new government to include this in their new Skills England initiative, as well as set aside budget for adult learning.
To regain its status as a manufacturing powerhouse, it’s clear that the new labour government must invest into fashion, manufacturing and skill generation to promote growth and gain back the ground we’ve lost as one of the world’s biggest manufacturing nations.