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 Macmillan Gap - named after the committee's chair. By 1945 Britain had created a new institution, the Industrial and Commercial Finance Corporation, to try to close it.

In this episode, Rob explores what that history can teach us now. Why do viable industrial investments still fall between conventional bank lending and growth capital? What role should public finance play where demand is real but uncertain? And what would it take to rebuild the industrial intelligence, flexible products and patience needed to turn capital into factories?

From ICFC and Oxford Instruments to today’s public finance institutions, this is an episode about the gap between having money in the system and being able to deploy it into productive industrial capacity.

How We Build Britain is independently produced. The views expressed are Rob Gilbert's own and do not represent Baringa, Great British Energy or the UK Government.

If you have questions, comments or suggestions - please send us a mail

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 train factory in Derby, Britain's offshore wind supply chain and Germany's deeper manufacturing ecosystem, I look at where industrial value actually sits, and why the nationality of a company's owner may matter less than the location of its factories, skills, engineering and suppliers.

The episode considers:

• Why procurement alone cannot substitute for industrial strategy
• How public demand can support investment and supply chain development
• Why rebuilding domestic capability may initially cost more
• The distinction between industrial policy and permanent protectionism
• How Britain can build more productive relationships with international partners

The central question is not simply whether public contracts go to British suppliers. It is whether Britain is building lasting, internationally competitive capability with the money it spends.

This podcast is independently produced. I am not speaking on behalf of the UK Government, Great British Energy or Baringa.

If you have questions, comments or suggestions - please send us a mail

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 connect food, manufacturing and national security.

It is also a story about what happens when commercially rational decisions gradually remove capabilities whose wider value is much harder to measure, and why Britain is now investing to rebuild some of them.

In this episode, Rob explores the connections between beer, bread and bombs, and asks a bigger question for UK reindustrialisation:

How do we decide which industrial capabilities matter before we discover their value by losing them?

How We Build Britain is independently produced. The views expressed are Rob Gilbert’s own and do not represent Baringa, Great British Energy or the UK Government.

If you have questions, comments or suggestions - please send us a mail

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 less urgency.

Rob Gilbert argues that we still can't answer it well enough, and that this is a state capacity problem rather than a data one. He explains why deployment investment doesn't automatically create domestic industrial capability, and what better industrial intelligence would mean for four things: spending public money more precisely, commercialising British innovation, attracting international manufacturers, and connecting productive capabilities across sectors that we currently treat as separate.

Along the way: the closure of the UK's last continuous filament glass fibre plant in Wigan, the government's Global Supply Chains Intelligence Programme, and a surgical robotics exercise that found twenty-nine times as many relevant British businesses as conventional analysis.

Britain cannot manufacture everything. It has to choose. But those choices only work if we understand what this country can already make, and what it could make next.

How We Build Britain explores how Britain can rebuild its industrial strength through energy, infrastructure, investment and production.

How We Build Britain is independently produced. The views expressed are Rob Gilbert’s own and do not represent Baringa, Great British Energy or the UK Government.

If you have questions, comments or suggestions - please send us a mail

If you have questions, comments or suggestions - please send us a mail

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 launched with Parsons turbines. Within a generation, the same technology was generating the world's electricity.

Parsons didn't just invent the turbine. He engineered, built and tested it on one river. This episode asks why that connection between invention and production once defined British industry, where it survives today, and what it should teach us now.

Along the way: how Sheffield turned a clockmaker's frustration into a century of steel, why the economist Alfred Marshall said industrial knowledge lived "in the air", what happened to graphene after Manchester discovered it, and why Derby, Barrow and the Tyne still hold the pattern that built Britain.

It ends with four tests for deciding what Britain should build next.

If you have questions, comments or suggestions - please send us a mail

Has Brexit damaged UK industry?

Ten years on from the referendum, the debate is still dominated by politics. But what does the evidence actually show?

In this episode, Rob Gilbert examines the Brexit balance sheet for British industry. He looks at the impact on trade, productivity and investment, and explores what the new trading relationship has meant for automotive, agriculture and food, chemicals, pharmaceuticals, defence and financial services.

The evidence points to a real economic cost, particularly for goods-producing sectors and smaller exporters. But Brexit did not begin Britain’s industrial decline, and many of the constraints blamed on Brussels were in fact the result of domestic political choices.

The episode also considers the opportunities created by regulatory autonomy, new trade agreements and greater freedom to support strategic industries — and why those freedoms have yet to produce a meaningful industrial dividend.

The central question is no longer whether Brexit was right or wrong. It is how Britain now works with its European allies, uses its independence where it creates genuine value, and rebuilds the industrial capability on which prosperity, security and national power depend.

How We Build Britain is independently produced. The views expressed are Rob Gilbert’s own and do not represent Baringa, Great British Energy or the UK Government.

Just how is the offshore wind industry in the UK really doing?

I put that question to Tim Pick on the fringe of Global Offshore Wind 2026 in Manchester. Tim is Britain's first offshore wind champion, a former clean power commissioner, vice president of the Energy Institute and chair of the Offshore Wind Growth Partnership.

We cover where the industry really stands, AR7 and the job of turning an allocation round into built projects, why Ardersier has upended the conventional wisdom on ports, the bet on floating wind in the Celtic Sea, and why the North Sea starts to sustain itself in the 2030s. Tim is also clear about the cost of politicising all this.

The question underneath it all is the one this show keeps coming back to. Do we build, or do we buy?

Feedback, guest suggestions and future episode requests are always welcome.

How We Build Britain is independently produced. The views expressed are Rob Gilbert’s own and do not represent Baringa, Great British Energy or the UK Government.

If you have questions, comments or suggestions - please send us a mail

If you have questions, comments or suggestions - please send us a mail

A million young people in Britain are now not in education, employment or training, the highest level in over a decade. Alan Milburn’s interim review into young people and work has laid out the scale of it. This episode argues that underneath the headline numbers is a story about what happened to British industry, and that rebuilding it is part of the answer.
The review’s findings are stark: more than a million 16 to 24-year-olds are NEET, six in ten have never had a job at all, and the cost runs to around £125 billion a year.

As Britain’s industrial base declined, it took the way into work with it, the apprenticeships and vocational routes that asked for a start rather than a degree. You cannot fix worklessness without work, and for too many young people the first rung simply isn’t there any more.
Part of why this is so hard to act on is how, over decades, we have come to measure the worth of public investment, counting the costs that land now more confidently than the returns that build slowly: industrial capability, supply chains, and jobs in the places that have waited longest for them.

The episode makes the case for a broader idea of value, and sets out four things we need to do to act on it: count value differently, use what the state already buys, rebuild the routes into work, and let our institutions take long-term risk.

How We Build Britain is independently produced. The views expressed are Rob Gilbert’s own and do not represent Baringa, Great British Energy or the UK Government.