Industrial Strategy and the Circular Economy

The UK Government are currently holding a consultation on ‘building an industrial strategy that addresses the long-term challenges to the UK economy’, and they want YOUR opinion by 17^th April. Earlier in March, our Principal Consultant Ellen Struthers went along to Westminster Business Forum’s Keynote Seminar which discussed the draft priorities in the strategy.

The industrial strategy, currently a working draft, aims to improve both living standards and economic growth by increasing productivity across the whole of the UK. Even at this early stage, building an effective strategy, and ultimately achieving it, is far from an easy task. In the light of Brexit, and also with the potential for an independent Scotland, geographic areas which have relied on each other for workforce and markets for so long are set to become disparate.

The seminar was a fantastic opportunity to take part in discussions with a broad range of industries about how we can particularly accelerate the work of the UK’s manufacturing sector. Here’s what I perceive are the themes which kept coming up as priorities for the strategy to address:

• Interconnectivity – horizontal rather than vertical approaches across strategies, interventions, industries and regions. This is likely to involve consideration of multi-disciplinary areas e.g. education and skills, environment, transport infrastructure, and housing to ensure that operating approaches, workforce availability and skills can be optimized. A practical example of what this means is ensuring that, if the number of manufacturing roles increases in an area, that there are enough local homes available to enable the workforce to live nearby.
• Innovation – trying out new, maybe disruptive, ways of tackling industry issues. In particular, procurement processes tend to be focussed on proven technologies and low risk solutions – which doesn’t really carry the flag for radical thinking and provide the opportunity for game changing ideas to get the investment they need to become the new normal. Some procurement approaches therefore need to change to better support innovation.
• Skills development – equipping people with the right skills so that they know how to make products and services that can help deliver a circular economy, and do so in the most efficient way. This is particularly true for those in delivering roles such as design and engineering.
• Optimization of efficiency – a point was made by one of the speakers that we are generally good at identifying when people are not productive, but we need to get better at identifying when material supply and processes are not efficient. As part of this, there’s a need for collaboration and close working along supply chains to ensure that everyone can help contribute to, and reap the rewards from, innovation and ways to optimise processes.

The term ‘circular economy’ is one which came up several times at the event and, as we’ve written about many times before, is an all-encompassing term which covers the priorities above very nicely. To echo my colleague Debbie in her blog on how building a resilient economy is synonymous with making it circular too, ‘we have a small window of opportunity to influence the next resource revolution’. You have until 11:45pm on 17^th April to respond on the industrial strategy – take the chance while you can!

Get in touch if you’d like to talk about increasing your organization’s productivity through innovation and optimizing your supply chain processes, or take a look at our two page guide on implementing circular economy into your operations.