A second industrial revolution is within reach and it starts on the factory floor

Those machines depend on thousands of precision metal components. At the base of it all is production and right now, Britain's production base is close to crumbling.

When people picture British industry, they think of the primes: Rolls-Royce, Jaguar Land Rover or BAE Systems. But the UK's manufacturing base isn't concentrated in big businesses. It's spread across tens of thousands of small firms in industrial parks most people have never heard of. These are the workshops that make the components that make the engines spin, and the power stations run, and they are in serious trouble.

They operate in isolation, rely on a handful of customers, lack access to modern software or artificial intelligence and struggle to finance the equipment they need. Yet the most urgent threat isn't competition from China or automation. It's the age of the people running them. The average machine shop owner in Britain is in their mid-sixties. When they retire, there is often no one to take over. Workshops close and expertise disappears - precisely as demand in the West for components in critical industries is accelerating.

This is why the gap between our aspirations outlined in strategy documents and our actual capacity matters so much. A ship or a helicopter is the sum of thousands of manufactured components. Commitments and contracts are only as credible as the production base behind them. The lesson from Ukraine is blunt: industrial output wins wars.

So what would fixing the foundations actually require? First, capital. Machine tools such as CNC machines, the atomic units of manufacturing, can cost hundreds of thousands, sometimes millions of pounds. For a small family-run workshop, that is a big barrier. Lower it, and you unlock growth immediately.

But finance alone isn't enough, because the deeper problem is fragmentation, which is why I founded Isembard. We build our own franchisee factories enabling new and existing factory owners to accelerate production for critical industries. The same logic that transformed hospitality through franchising can work in manufacturing. We already run six factories across the UK and US, with plans for 25 more by the end of the year.

The talent is here. Britain's depth in aerospace, defence and engineering is extraordinary. What we have lacked, for decades, is the ambition to organise it. A second industrial revolution is within reach, and it will be built on the factory floor, one part at a time.

____________________

Alexander Fitzgerald is the founder and CEO of Isembard, which manufactures precision parts for critical industries.

LBC Opinion provides a platform for diverse opinions on current affairs and matters of public interest.

The views expressed are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official LBC position.

To contact us email opinion@lbc.co.uk