Government pays for something it calls "fashion" already.
The Department for Business and the Greater London Authority (confusingly called "British Fashion Council" for the purpose) help sellers connect to overseas buyers and have used export credit guarantees a lot according to newspaper reports. The British Fashion Council has a web page promoting them. London taxpayers pay half a million or more a year for British Fashion Council; exhibitors pay a lot to exhibit there and at a couple of feeder shows run by art colleges rather than by manufacturers.
There are a couple of problems with the scheme I think.
- Taxpayers can subsidise asian-made proucts, if a UK "designer" comissions them
UK Trade and Investment helped sell Indian pants, for example, under the Pants to Poverty brand, and there are plenty of other products at London Fashion Week from unknown manufacturers, maybe unknown and in the UK usually unknown and in some sweatshop country or autocracy. That was an odd case because the Department for International Development was keen, but generally the taxpayer gets less bang for their buck by by backing exports of asian-made products. The chances of helping manufacturing areas is low. - Export credit schemes might have been abused
I saw goods priced much higher than usual at London Fashion Week — maybe double. I also saw a newspaper report that they are often sold to the taxpayer in effect, because export credit guarantees given and used for bad debts. Now: imagine you're noughtly. We could dream-up a scheme together couldn't we?
Supply chain resilience is now a thing.
I have not read the policy, but I know that supply of cotton medical gowns was a huge problem during the COVID emergency, while non-woven materials are still made in the UK. "Our problem is that it comes off the machine at so many metres a second," someone told me about an ex-ICI factory making weed-control fabric in Wales. I do not know if this works for medical gowns, but I am sure that nobody checked before setting up supply chains from China in ways that did not work.
National Procurement Policy is a thing.
I have not read the policy. But ministers have spoken and shown interest. How can every tax-funded agency be persuaded to procure in a better way? Buyers are presumably much like the rest of us, used to working in a service economy where plenty of suppliers exist, like applicants for jobs, responding to an advert. But the suppliers and the adverts are not geared to UK manufacturing, and cannot be, because nobody really knows where it is or what it can make.
Representative organisations are a problem mentioned in a post below. In the past, fashion was treated as a creative industry, so publicly funded creative-industry organisations were assumed to “represent” it, particularly on training needs, but they could not get much feedback from manufacturers. Private trade associations exist, such as the British Footwear Association or the Fashion and Textiles Round Table, but small manufacturers don't all have the cash to join, even if they have the time and it's their kind of thing.
How do you “represent” a diffuse supply chain of firms that are quite different from service industries?
- Rare; it is hard to find the last firms that can still do x, y, or z.
- Able to spread money into unusual areas.
- Very lean, often without an advertising budget or sales representatives, so they suffer when consumers buy advertised brands.
- Easily closed down when exchange rates move sharply, as in the 1980s.
- Hard to re-establish once machines and skills have gone.
- Historically reliant on home-market interest, but this now seems old-fashioned and hard to renew.
On the other hand, a government answer to an MP was that they do not want to “tell people what to buy”. So the question becomes: how do you promote interest in UK-made goods without patronising consumers?
