How We Build Britain

Why can’t Britain finance the factories it says it wants to build? The UK has some of the deepest capital markets in the world, yet industrial businesses still struggle to raise the patient, long-term capital needed to expand. That problem is not new. In 1931 a committee was established by the government to assess the UK economy and finance sector, amongst its findings was a structural gap in access to capital for small and medium sized industrial businesses, it became known as the Macm...

Britain's public sector spends close to £400 billion a year (with £90bn of government contracts). So are we really failing to buy British? In this episode I look at the evidence, which suggests that the majority of direct public sector procurement spending goes to suppliers classified as British. That figure comes with real limitations, but it points at a deeper problem. Buying from a British company is not necessarily the same thing as building British industrial capability. Using Alstom's t...

In 2018, Britain started running short of beer. The cause was not breweries, hops or malt. It was carbon dioxide, and one of the reasons for the shortage was that fertiliser plants had stopped making fertiliser. That strange connection is the starting point for this episode of How We Build Britain. From Billingham on the Tees to Bishopton in Renfrewshire, this is a story about the industrial foundations beneath everyday life: the chemicals, materials, skills and production capabilities that c...

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...

In June 1897, the Royal Navy assembled the greatest fleet in the world at Spithead for Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee. Among the vessels in attendance was a small experimental boat from the Tyne called Turbinia. By the end of the day, she was the star of the show. Powered by Charles Parsons' steam turbine, an engine the Admiralty had been slow to take seriously, she raced past the assembled fleet at thirty-four knots, and nothing there could match her. Nine years later, HMS Dreadnought laun...