Westminster Hall debate: Onshoring in the fashion and textiles industry

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Catherine West (Lab)

• Public Procurement: Prioritise ethical sourcing and local manufacturing (e.g., uniforms for military, prisons, NHS) via the Procurement Act 2023.
  
  Imagining the opposite arguments without agreeing wih them.
  
  The taxpayer can't afford to pay for dentists, debt, defence, social care, so how can UK-made uniforms be a higher priority? Ministers in 2004 were keen to quote £23 million savings on a £50 million bill by buying from a contractor that might do trials and top-ups and remedial work close to home but hoped to contract as much as possible to China. 
  
  Maybe the taxpayer could afford to split the contract into £10,000 chunks, or at least consult existing sew factories to say what kind of order size they want, how much notice they want, what the most conventient way to provide patterns and fabric is; generally to see it from a factory point of view. The cost would be more buying staff at the MOD.
  
  The educated view is to say "comparative advantage" out of some long-forgotten economics textbook that doesn't have a clue; non-educated people ask for home production. Educated people should smile and nodd. You could see a bit of this in the Westminster Hall debate where very few MPs turned-up to to watch.
  
  I think that tax-funded buyers should be offered a list of relevant UK manufactuers and asked to inform each one about the order, and publish any feedback about whether a smaller order or a more precise order - maybe boots instead of general PPE - could have helped them compete. This could be a cheap way of finding local contractors who can help with just a tweak to the contract.
  
  
• Support for Small Firms: Capital expenditure aid, R&D funding, and training/apprenticeship promotion.
  
  
• Fashion Watchdog: Proposed to protect small manufacturers from unfair practices (e.g., late payments, order cancellations).
  
  Modelled on the grocery watchdog. I'm not sure how this works in practice but - given accounts of how retailers treat their wholsale suppliers - this can only be good. There's a question about whether overseas firms can use the same watchdog. If so, can we charge a tariff to pay the cost? If not, surely a buyer will bully an overseas supplier to pay airmail instead of bullying a supplier with a watchdog.
  
  Two side-notes.
  
  (1) We pay a little towards this idea of fast fashion through British Fashion Council, which is an office at the Greater London Assembly so not what it sounds like at all. We might also subsidise fashion courses, which find it easier to teach sketching than production. The graduates sometimes end-up as buyers for those very retailers which bully suppiers.
  
  (2) The idea that it feels good to wear British is a way of keeping orders in the UK.
  I saw two idential bundles of socks in Primark a year or two ago.
  One was made in Portugal, a democratic welfare state with a good human rights record.
  One was made in China with "Primark Cares" on it, because there was some kind of recycled yarn. So the sock-buying public is not averse to buying things from China that have "Cares" written on them. There is scope for some kind of public education here but it's hard to know how and I should come back to this.
  
  
• Sustainability: Invest in recycling, used garment collection, and regenerated fabrics to make the UK a global leader in sustainable fashion.
  
  
• Skills & Education: Partner with universities (e.g., Manchester Metropolitan) to integrate automation/robotics into fashion education.
  
  There's a chance to get some training and apprenticeship promotion for free I hope.
  Fashion colleges exploit their overseas students by teaching what's cheap to teach, like mood boards, rather than what's expensive and dull like how to fix a secondhand machine. (similar to economics courses that teach maths rather than critical thought and background, but that's a digression)
  
  A postgraduate footwear course at London College of Fashion did not produce a single shoe, although I think one student managed a kit. One student's mood board represented "depression" through her shoe sketches.
  
  Government can try to stop colleges ripping-off students by forcing colleges them to give more detail about how they can help a real-life dressmaker or shoemaker, not a moodboard one who will compete for a tiny pool of job vacancies. Education of prospective students in how to choose a course would be good as well; if people knowingly walk-in to a cheap-to-teach no-prospects job, that's fine. Meanwile the system would promote more practical education and the same colleges could compete to provide apprenticeship training as well.

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Shockat Adam (Ind)

• Military/NHS Uniforms: Mandate UK manufacturing for national security and economic benefits (e.g., British Army’s £80M annual clothing budget).
  
  If I were a minister asked to make cuts because government can't afford dentists, social care, and defence, I would ignore this suggestion.
  
  Maybe the solution is for soldiers to use more used uniform if they want, and for the MOD to get better at selling unwanted uniform. Over the years the MOD has closed NAAFI and more recently the Russian military seem to use Wildberry's (like Amazon) for supply. At the moment I understand the MOD sell bails of surplus at auction and army surplus dealers have to re-construct all the sizes and other technical detail by picking through the bail; it would be better to keep the information intact and sell direct to consumers as well as to wholesale buyers.
  
  MOD clothing has very clear sizing and good quality. If the MOD, or parts of it, could just get better at selling surplus, with all their inside knowledge of sizing and provenance and quality standards, that would make money.
  
  Alonside this, maybe there is some way to get more uniform made in the UK. My own experience is thinking about selling boots to the MOD and finding the system quite opaque while trying to look transparent.
  
  
• Garment Trading Adjudicator: Modelled on the Groceries Code Adjudicator to enforce fair purchasing practices (e.g., penalise brands for order volatility).
  
  
• Tax Incentives:
  
  Break for companies using waste/deadstock fabrics to tackle fashion waste.
  
  I don't understand how this could work.
  I do think that the fabric recycling companies - the ones that make shoddy or speaker cones or even bales of clothing for export - could be paid to put on exhibitions in high streets. 
  
  

• "Made in the UK" Trademark: Restrict label to genuinely UK-made products (currently exploitable loophole).

• ...this has been done but government can do it better. The people who did it used a registered trade mark for use only as defined under some piece of legislation, current or not, that had a definition.
  
  The loopholes can be tidied-up for use of the union jack symbol.
  Ebay sellers often use it to show that they sell from the UK. Maybe someone could design them a logo for their purpose.
  Portugese bootmakers use it to show that their boots are inspired by the UK, making sure that "made in Portugal" is visible on packing. I have met these people. I think that maybe the message is too complicated and needs simplifying for consumers; I think a union jack should mean a product has final and significant assembly or manufacturing in the UK and someone better qualified than me can find a definition.
  
  
  
  
  MadeInBritain.org have already done it. The trouble is that it's £234 including VAT and as one MP said, if you are making in the UK you have a lot of costs that overseas manufacturers do not have; it is a surprise you are in business at all. A proportion of UK businesses will be loss-making, waiting to close, in recievership, or in the hands of people who are doing a lot of jobs at once and may be young, old, ill, or not tuned-in to the idea of a Made in Britain brand. No wonder there are only three footwear manufacturers on the list. My wholesaler used to buy from a slipper manufacturer that used these tags which cost about 2p + VAT and delivery. I kept some and used them in photos of other products, but, again, these products didn't fly off the shelves.
  
  
  
• Consumer Awareness Campaign: Fund initiatives to highlight local manufacturing benefits.
  
  "Made in a Democratic Welfare State" is what I write in small print on my products, but they don't fly off the shelves! On the other hand, a lot of buyers don't know that Bangladesh or India has no welare state while competitors in Leicester do, and this raises costs. Some of these people write trade deals. Others write economics text books. There's a need for a range of slogans in case some of them work. They need
  
  ...why buy British? and not Belgian? or Chinese? And put in a positive way in a range of sentences? Now that lots of us are quite international in where we live or come from, the idea of supporting British products like supporting a British football team still makes some sense, but there needs to be more to say why I should feel good wearing a British sock. Put another way, you can already buy union jack swing tags at Moorplan, but, by themselves, they don't make things fly off the shelves if the competition is cheaper or better advertised or more often re-styled.
  
  
• National Body: Create a director of manufacturers to advocate for the sector and foster regional clusters (e.g., Sheffield, Manchester).
  
  National register of factories with options to opt-in or opt-out of add comments like whether the factory is interested in outside orders and what their usual minimum order is, what kind of machinary they use and what they are set-up to make. Much of this information could and probably would be added-on by freemium private sector providers, but the basics could be provided from HMRC data - VAT and income tax - as well as improved Companies House detail and import/export data. This is something that central govenment can do best. Regional government has to ask for the data each time they have an idea.
  
  If other nearby governments join-in, better still.
  
  I worry a bit that London regional government will have no interest at all in factories and unless I move from London I will have to put up with this.

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Sarah Olney (LD)

• Legislation: Introduce a duty of care for environmental/human rights in supply chains, with full traceability requirements.
  
  I suggest that a factory label on each garment should satisfy the tracability requirement.
  In India, this is normal anyway. 
  In military clothing, it used to be normal to have a factory name stamped inside: I know from old army surplus trousers.
  
  I think government needs to help retailers. If a country like Myanmar has one of the worst human rights records and no welfare state, I think it should be government that schemes-up a system of tariffs to make Mayanmar goods more expensive but rewards those countries that get better. I don't think Temu or British Home Stores or Amazon are the best people to do it individually; I think government should do it for everyone in the UK and preferably acting with other governments.
  
  
• Joint Liability: Hold retailers accountable for sub-contractor violations (e.g., forced labour in Xinjiang cotton).
• China Strategy: Ban UK listings for companies using slave labour.
• Skills Upskilling: Government-funded training to address machinist shortages.
• Export Support: Reduce Brexit-related barriers for small businesses (e.g., knitwear exporters).
  
  This is a huge thing for me as a sole trader under the VAT threshold - some way to pay EU VAT in advance and know what the bill will be, so I can somehow type it into my software that quotes ecommerce shipping costs. There may already be modules for some platforms like Shopify but I don't know about them; I think government has a role trying to make this avaialable.
  
  Better still would be to synchronise VAT so that if something is sold legally in the UK, that's good enough for the VAT authorities in France or whatever EU country. If Brexiteers have some emotive slogan against this, deport them to Rowanda.

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Rebecca Paul (Con)

• Cost Reduction: Lower energy costs, business rates, and regulatory burdens to improve UK competitiveness.
• Skills Pipeline: Strengthen technical education routes for garment/textile manufacturing.
• Trust Rebuilding: Address past labour compliance issues to restore confidence in UK sourcing.
• Export Growth: Leverage UKFT’s trade show support and London Fashion Week to boost global brand reputation.
  
  London Fashion Week should
  - ask UK factories to nominate good customers to show (this requires a list of UK factories)
  - display the names of the UK factories alongside the person who has designed a sock or whatever (let's be honest: rapid changes of fashion are over-rated and pretty crappy idea)
  

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Chris Bryant (Minister for Trade)

• Procurement Reform: Use Procurement Act 2023 to expand ethical/local sourcing across all government departments (e.g., MOD uniforms).
  
  Software and web sites could be cheaper than more legislation.
  I haven't done a job like buying hospital gowns for a Sodexo hostpital, but guess I'd like a simple checklist if I had to do it:
  - inform UK contractors on a website written for the purpose and ask for comment about how the order could be changed to suit them
  - buy from the same person as before who puts-in cheap bids
  - the web page publishes feedback, often anonymised
  - wait for the boss to tell me if I should do anything different next time
  - look for ideas myself like sending smaller more specific orders such as "100 gowns" rather than "1000 units of PPE including helmets gowns and footwear".
  
  
• R&D Funding: £4.3B allocated for manufacturers, including fashion (e.g., antimicrobial fabrics, automation).
• Trade Promotion: Enhance support for SMEs in exports (e.g., London Fashion Week, British Fashion Council).
• Responsible Business Conduct: Review to curb forced labour/sustainability issues without overburdening businesses.
• Late Payment Crackdown: Address cash flow issues for small suppliers.

Summeries of points by Mistral.ai

Open Letter post Brexit 2021

I'm catching up on Fashion Round Table open letters such as this one Post-Brexit in 2021

VAT fracture was my experience of Brexit. It's in the open letter for exports. 

For the sake of UK fashion brands ... If they sell B2C online to EU customers, these customers are now charged with VAT, duties and handling fees amounting to an additional 30% on top of the product price, making them less likely to continue buying from UK brands. This will impact UK SMEs who cannot afford to pay EU distributors and use online sales platforms, the most.

Oddly enough, the new EU €3 tariff isn't so much of a problem. Send.Royalmail.com can add the money if I give enough detail about what I'm sending. They copied software written quickly to pay a new Trump tariff in the US. I wrote to their help desk on 20th of July 2026 to ask if they can help with VAT now, as a substitute for the slow expensive systems that have cropped-up gradually, usually based on DHL.

Thank you for contacting Royal Mail.

After reading through your case notes I can see that you would like to find out if there is a way to pay French VAT charges in advance.

I am sorry to say that at present Royal Mail/Parcelforce do not offer this type of service. The intended recipient in France will receive some form of notification from the French Customs.

I am sorry that on this occasion I could not provide you with a more favourable response to your enquiry. . If you require any further assistance in the future please feel free to visit our Help and Support


The same goes for importing, if I am not registered for VAT. I pay Italian VAT on boots. Then the courier charges VAT on import. If I ask the seller whether they can knock-off the VAT, it depends which country and what kind of VAT export scheme exists and the supplier has time to use, but the general rule is that they'll only do it if I have a UK VAT number.

I saw there was a UK government response to the open letter.

Prior to 31 December 2020, VAT was due on goods sold to consumers from the UK to the EU through the VAT return system. VAT was either due in the EU Member States or in the UK, and was remitted to the relevant tax authority through a VAT return.

From 1 January, the UK has left the Single Market and the EU Customs Union. Items moving between countries normally attract customs duty and import VAT (where applicable) in the country of importation.

[section on the UK Trade and Co-Operation Agreement and how it dealt with tariffs went here].

Exports of goods from Great Britain to the EU are zero-rated for UK VAT, and the importer of goods into an EU Member State may incur a charge of VAT. The tax treatment of these goods upon importation into the EU is a matter for the EU. Note that the EU VAT Directive requires Member States to exempt imports of goods of negligible value from VAT. Further information can be found on the European Commission website under taxation and Customs Union.

So the system might just work for a lorry load of goods sent by a courier that can do the administration, but it is so creaky for one-off parcels that trade ceased, just as there isn't much trade with other countries that don't have a generous tax-free minimum import. The problem is that even if a few exporters make the system work and pay in advance, others won't and EU customers give-up on any UK-made product for fear of it coming with an extra VAT and collection bill and a note to collect from a sorting office.

This wouldn't matter if I could buy from the UK - safety boots for example. There used to be a couple of big factories making them cheaply here, in Bristol and Rushden. Unfortunaly, exchange-rate hikes make it very difficult to manufacture anything in the UK and both firms closed after one exchange-rate hike or another. There is also a problem getting UK consumers to recognise that UK manufacturing can be a feel-good choice with ethical advantages. This applies to retail customer, and wholesale ones who can be capricious and take their order to another factory or another country; small factories face a boom and bust existance which would lessen if wholesale customers could use UK origins as more of a sales point, and took pride in nurturing suppliers. (The example that comes to mind is East End Manufacturing, which I knew as a small shareholder.)

There's another problem of a government that prioratises the "creative economy", which is that non-manufacturing sides of fashion get on the same lobby letter, sometimes arguing in opposite directions.

Different lobby points for different activities: mass retail.

Oxford Economics and the £35 billion figure that fashion "contributes"

The retailers have their "35 billion" figure for things like clothes shop turnover, expanded to include things like PR and advertising and quite a small amount of UK manufacuring.  I think there's another Oxford Economics repord with a lower figure produced for UK Fashion and Textiles in 2023 that mentions "barriers to procurement", so these reports are not all bad. The trouble with including so much retail in the figure is that if people didn't spend money in clothes shops they'd spend it somewhere else, maybe somewhere where the money circulates more often round the UK economy than a pounds spent on Bangladeshi textiles in Next or on Temu. I suppose I should keep quiet about this as a retailer myself - although I sell things made in the UK - but there's another odd group....

London Fashion Week trying to "put London on the map"

London Fashion Week civil servants who "put London on the map" at some cost including a kind of crowding-out of attention to real life manufacturing or small business. They also add to crowding on the Picadilly Line and count that as one of their measurable benefits. Really. I have done freedom of information requests to check! They claim footfall and column inches as signs of success.

If the whole event could close, or start showing fashion made closer to home with names of the factories included on the stands, and if the export credit from UK Trade and Investment was well monitored, maybe we'd get some benefit from them. If exhibitors were nominated by UK factories, so the ones who were good customers got nominated, that would be better still. 

Oddly enough, this was mentioned in the exchange of letters. Civil servants and ministers are led to believe that British Fashion Council is something to do with the sector:

Secondly, we are unable to liaise with the British Fashion Council, as they are not as responsive as we, or you, need. Whilst we appreciate their dedication to British design talent, new emerging designers and creating export opportunities for these brands overseas, they do not represent the entire fashion industry. London Fashion Week is a twice yearly event, which for the modelling industry represents no more than 3% of their business and this is echoed across the sector. They do not have the entire fashion sector's interest as their core remit, unlike Fashion Roundtable. For example, if you are a machinist in Leicester, a model in Manchester, own a shopping complex in the West Country, a modest fashion company in Leeds, a denim brand in Cardiff, a brand in Liverpool, a manufacturer in Halifax, a fashion tech company in the Midlands, a boutique owner in Brighton, a stylist in London, a fashion photographer in Margate, a bridal shop in Mayfair, a consultant who lives between London and Paris, a sustainable brand in Oxfordshire, a handbag brand in Wimbledon, or a cashmere brand in Edinburgh, it is unlikely the BFC would be able to support your requests

What manufacturing needs is trade directories backed by government data.

What manufacturing needs is trade directories backed by government data.

Every sector of the economy could probably do with this. If you've ever thought of getting something printed, you will have realised the variety of printing techniques alongside binding and different minimum orders, you will probably have found incomplete trade directories and done a bit of googling. The same is true of services as well, if you want to find the right lawyer or plumber. With manufacturing, there are extra problems and it doesn't matter why, although I think I can describe, it just matters that it's true. I know it's true from trying to sell vegan footwear, mainly in the 2000s 2010s, and trying to find suppliers. A frustration is that if you do strike gold; if you discover your perfect supplier, ig quite likely closes because not enough other people have discovered it!

A year or so ago I wrote something for a government consulation and put the text here because slightly public, which makes it more interesting to edit just in case someone reads! It is also harder to loose than files on my hard disc. I will try to edit a little this June '26 

This is what I wrote.

I propose greater access to raw data on

• employment types,

• industrial classifications (from VAT and income tax records), and

• export data by product classification and manufacturing origin.

Companies House already provides business classification data, which could be refined and supplemented with additional data sources. The goal is to enable the creation of comprehensive UK trade directories, similar to historical resources like The Shoe Trades Directory to identify which firms manufacture specific products in the UK—from footwear and clothing to solar panels.

It looks as though a government consultation suggested this format.

 1. Who looses?
 1. Who gains?
 3. Why government? How much do Google, AI, or private sector directories like Kompass or Checkatrade do the job already? Why don't suppliers all just get good web sites or join a trade association?

 1. Who looses?

• Businesses loose privacy, and might not want orders
  Some sole traders may prefer confidentiality, but might forget to tick a box on their tax form to request this. They might prefer an anonimous kind of contact form instead of a name and address for contact. 
  
  
• Taxpayers loose other services (unless this brings in more tax, which is a bet)
  I think trade directories are a safe bet for raising tax revenue and growing the economy.
  But there is a cost to releasing data - mainly in deciding how.
  
  
• Legal & policy change: Currently, FOI requests for HMRC data are rejected under the Commissioners for Revenue and Customs Act 2005. However, the Act does allow exceptions where "specified in regulations made by the Treasury" or where "the Commissioners are satisfied that it is in the public interest" (Section 20, UK Legislation). So, ministers and senior people in the treasury have to write regulations or persuade “commissioners”.
  
  
• Bombing targets in a war: The BAE shell manufacturing plant is already capable of being put underground in Wales, I think.

 2. Who gains?

Trade directories benefit...

• Buyers & sellers: Businesses searching for niche products (e.g., wiring looms, speaker cones, footwear components) would have a reliable resource. A past example includes a car manufacturer requesting tariff exemptions due to difficulty sourcing specific UK-made components. Also, when a factory isn't visible, it might not be viable. You can find your speaker cone factory or shoe factory, and then it closes because not enough other people are interested.

• Jobseekers: Easier access to local employers and industry information. Business owners might spot gaps in the market more clearly as well.
  The UK produced non-woven materials for things like weed control fabric, but there was nowhere for buyers to look to find cotton alternatives; there were schemes to try to out- bid other countries and get gowns from China.
  . 
• Economic planners & policymakers: 
  Economists spot inflationary pressures from something like an oil price rise, have a think, and suggest putting the interest rate up. This closes factories. Really, that's how the system works!
  They do talk a little about "the supply side", but tend just to think about wages and a vague "productivity" idea; they don't have information about how to install more solar panels and wind farms to counter-act the oil price rise. I think that if more information were available, at least an economist could point towards an area and say "that's the area of expertise that might help reduce inflation".
  
  
• The UK produced medical ventilators for very ill people during the COVID crisis with the designs already worked-out and ready to make in bigger quantities, but I remember that this information emerged slowly.National security & trade policy: The UK needs resilient supply chains. If the USA restricts weapons exports or trade tensions with China escalate, policymakers must quickly identify local alternatives.
  
  
• MPs and regional development agencies
  ...need to know what is already being made in their areas in order to help if they can or just to consult.
  
  
• Apprenticeship providers
  The Mayor of Manchester boasted that he had got training and demand to match-up better in Manchester so that people could train to do real jobs installing solar panels (if I remember right).
  
  
• Journalists and bloggers 
  This is a few points in one.
  Journalists report on "a previously unknown private mine" if there is an accident or "possibly the last piano manufacturer" when Yamaha ceased production. A story about one of the last two scissor manufacturers caught-on and kept production viable. With this rather puzzled kind of coverage, it is hard er for buyers to enjoy feeling part of the story.
  
  This happened to me last year. I was buying a car battery on ebay, like you do, and found that Lucas batteries are made in Sri Lanca;. UK ones are made by Yuasa in Ebbow Vale. There was even a £2.5 million grant from the Welsh government, and it could hae got a better return on investment if sypathetic buyers had recnised the brand and thought "that's nice", and felt good, rather than scrolling-on down the list. So I am mixing-up buyer sympathy with journalist and blogger exposure and could probably tease the points out more clearly but hope you get the idea
  
  
• Startups & innovators: Smaller firms, particularly those competing against low-cost imports, lack the magin and scale for an advertising budget. As the founder of The Kinky Boot Factory noted in a documentary, imported shoes enter the UK at £15, while the rest of the wholesale cost is advertising. UK manufacturers cannot afford such advertising, and a trade directory would level the playing field.
  
  
• Larger importers who need top-ups trials and remedials done closer to their customers
  Surface mail from Asia can take 2-3 and the cheap suppliers like large orders. For clothing, without UK factories, this can lead to -
  ◦ Rushed Asian orders which can lead to worse working conditions in Asian factories.
  ◦ Expensive & high-emission air freight. This point made  by Addidas who tried publishing their low transport emmisions data for a few years. They gave up. Each year there were a few rushed orders that stopped the data liiking so good.
  ◦ Clearance pricing on the ranges that are missing some sizes.
  Each of these problems can be solved, ideally, with a UK factory willing to do smaller quicker orders while the container loads or the cartons come from Asia.

3. Why government?
How much do Google, AI, or private sector directories like Kompass or Checkatrade do the job already?

The problem is manufactuers, not service providers.

• Historical context:
  A Shoe Trades Directory from 1998 listed nearly every footwear and footwear component manufacturer in the UK, including batch sizes, pricing tiers, and production methods. This allowed buyers to contact the right suppliers with the right questions and most likely get a reply. It was sponsored by a shoe trade magazine where the advertising sales staff had ato make the list anyway. The internet now provides some of this information for free and footwear trade magazines are long-gone in the UK, but the subtle detail of who makes exactly what in what minimum orders and whether they are mass-market, “top end” or in the middle are hard to find.
  
  
• Broad hostoricla context: north v south.
  Everybody knows that industrial areas have suffered after loss of trade to low-wage countries.
  In 1979 a new economic policy managed to control inflation by raising interest rates. Almost by mistake, the transmission mechanism of monetary policy raises exchange rates at the same time and my estimate is that a fifth of manufacturing was lost in five years. Another interest rate spike followed in the mid 80s. (The same exchange rate fluctuations also effect cheap tourism, where the choice between Blackpool and Alicante can depend on the exchange rate.)
  
  The positive way of putting this is that maybe more manufacturing went to cheaper countries than need have done; there could be a chance to get some back if consumers felt good about buying British and buyers were able to find British factories.
  
  
• Manufacturing is rare and subdivided into more specialities than the people on Checkatrade who can probably concentrate on a few postcodes and do more than one kind of job. Manufacturing depends on a set of machines and the product the machines usually make. I suppose that's why it's rarer to find a manufacturer diretory than a service directory.
  
  
• Competition from cheap countries that lack a welfare state. You might expect the UK’s only manufacturer of some particular niche product to be good at sifting emails for customer enquiries. The reality for clothing manufacturers, according to the Make it British web site, is that they are more like some of the plumbers and plasterers on Checkatrade, working without a receptionist or a sales rep and just scanning the emails on a smartphone in-between a load of other jobs. They tend not to list their capabilities online, leading to many ignored inquiries from businesses unaware of minimum order requirements or production methods. 

Trade directories can help, as they have in the past

I propose the creation of an online database of UK manufacturers, based on HMRC records. Businesses could be listed as either:

• “Willing to receive inquiries”, or
• “Opted out of direct contact” 
• " .... " - individuals might want to be ex-directory.

The database should be indexed by:

• Manufacturing classification (from VAT/income tax records). Income tax is important as I don't think ministries have information about sole trader businesses that aren't registered for VAT.. We saw this in the way Brexit was negotiated: it's often uneconomic to sort the VAT on a small export to Europe, even if the courier does it. Importing, it's easy to end up ppaying VAT twice.
  
  
• Export/import declarations.
  
  
• Workforce size categories (e.g., "1-10 employees").
  
  
• Companies House classification (improved by prompts on Companies House forms to clarify what "manufacturer" means such as "manufactuer with own workshops in the UK".
  
  
• Optional business self-submissions, including website links, production details, and minimum order requirements.

Such a publicly accessible resource would encourage the private sector to develop value-added directories, including Kompass that already exists, while improving domestic trade efficiency. It's something people expect to find already.

Conclusion

A UK-wide manufacturing database would enhance transparency, strengthen local supply chains, and reduce unnecessary imports, benefiting businesses, workers, and policymakers alike. The key is to ensure privacy safeguards, minimal taxpayer burden, and a user-friendly format to encourage adoption. Would be happy to discuss further.

Government pays for something it calls "fashion". Odd isn't it?

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.

1. 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, as the designers are not forced to name their suppliers and UK suppliers are crowded out of media attention by this event promoting designers wherever they get their stuff made.
   
   The people who set this scheme up might have assumed that manufacturing would and could close altogether, but it hasn't and it's needed for startups and niche companies who want things made in the UK, as well as large importers who want trials and top-ups or remedial work. This industry is really useful, and as a bang-for-buck taxpayer I want to promote it because it spreads money around in the UK economy.

1. 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?

Industrial Strategy: does it give UK suppliers a chance to sell to government?

A quick scan of Government statements suggests a slow change of procurement systems, they hope, to allow British products a chance. It came up in a debate about the Industrial Strategy (which I have not read) just recently.

I wrote the next few paragraphs without realising there's a change in procurement law that I ought to check-out, but the old freedom of information response below still gives an idea of the problem.

Years ago in 2019 I wrote a blog post now lost about Merseyside Police procurement of Firebikes – a kind of boys' dream of motorbike & fire extinguisher. I counted the number of UK motorbike manufacturers on Wikipedia and I hoped to find some statement about whether Merseyside Police gave these smaller enthusiast firms a chance before buying BMW. The answer looked like a "no", combined with a certification process and a need to apply. The motorcycle workshop that works in some other niche market has to know that the

1. tender exists and roughly how long it takes to apply
2. they are in with a chance (maybe someone like them got a contract before or BMW are expensive compared to their pricing)
3. certification is possible; maybe a tender can be granted subject to certification to reduce application costs

and all of these are possible but, if you are running a workshop along with tax and employment and the rest, would you think it plausible enough to spend time?

There are similar things about footwear, the trade I worked in. A process defines how you certify a safety boot, but the people doing the certification are expensive. Government could help by encouraging more people to go into the certification business and emphasising how simple some of the tests are. Government could even help with the cost. If you are applying to supply ceremonial footwear, the process is murky and nobody really knows how a certain firm gets the contract. If you want to supply air crew footwear – that had just changed when I looked.

This is the reply to the freedom of information request:

Firexpress:  The bikes complete with Firexpress system and personal protective equipment were purchased from the sole UK distributor for Firexpress, Depot Rail.  We do not get a choice of the motorbike that Depot Rail have had certified for use.

Motorcycles (General use).  These are purchased through the PITO Framework (Police Information Technology Organisation) which is a national framework for the purchase of cars, vans and motorcycles, and is available for Police and Fire Authorities to utilize and has followed the appropriate procurement process for the establishment of the Framework. Our Contract Standing Orders are published and are in the public domain.

I didn't dig deeper.

Now, some civil servant might be given the job as the current government is interested in using procurement more creatively. By chance it's my local MP who popped the question about Industrial Strategy. I will pop her question here at some point but meanwhile she got this reply

"there is a commitment among Ministers to ensure that Government procurement is targeted at British companies. My right hon. Friend the Secretary of State has made a strong commitment to reduce regulation and bureaucracy, so we can ensure that these contracts are awarded more efficiently and more easily to small businesses in the UK"

Nobody stated which civil servant is given the job of reviewing The Police Information Technology Network's framework for procuring bikes, or uniforms, or anything else, or how to get positive suggestions into their in-tray and some of the catch phrases are from the USA. My MP, asking the question, said "nobody ever got the sack for specifying IBM". Another catch phrase: "Will the last person out of Chicago please turn out the lights?", followed by attempts by the remaining institutions like colleges, hospitals and local government to hire local people and use local production.

From my own experience in working with agencies commissioned by local government trying to re-generate and support local employment, the attempts are often wildly botched and entirely the wrong people are hired to do a terrible job (I was in finge social work and the contractors were firms like NACRO or housing associations) but the idea is good even if past experience is mixed.

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After writing the text above, I realise that there have been changes in procurement law and guidance since 2023 which I know very little about. The guidance is called the National Procurement Policy Statement and I don't know if it is also law. An introduction says

"This new NPPS ensures that public money spent on public procurement supports delivery of the Government’s missions, delivers economic growth, supports small businesses, champions innovation, and creates good jobs and opportunities across the country"

the UK fashion and textiles industry - something just isn't clicking. What is it?

Why is the UK fashion industry so fragmented and under-supported—and what structure or system would actually make it coherent, represented, and properly funded? (that's an AI one line summery of these notes in progress from someone who runs Fashion Roundtable and wrote some notes in progress below. I'll comment in my next post)