Industry leaders unveil plan to strengthen the West Midlands advanced manufacturing cluster

A new action plan published by Project MADE will strengthen the West Midlands’ advanced manufacturing sector and make it easier for SMEs, supply chains, and universities to collaborate.

The 10-year plan will create a world-class advanced manufacturing sector, achieve 5% compound GVA growth with a final £44 billion annual output, and catalyse £1.6 billion in advanced manufacturing investment.

Project MADE underscores the region’s potential to develop advanced manufacturing practices, build new high-value supply chains, support scaling businesses, and generate employment opportunities across the region. The proposed vision would deliver on the government’s industrial strategy for the region, calling for a customer demand-led ecosystem that turns world-class innovation into scaled production.

The plan is built around four recommendations that will secure the region’s position as the UK’s leading advanced manufacturing supercluster:

• Establish “The advanced manufacturing supercluster”: Creating a new body with clear leadership and governance to drive coordination across the diverse advanced manufacturing ecosystem.
• Stimulate Customer Demand Generation activity: to connect SMEs directly to OEMs and Tier 1 buyers to address their pressing needs for resilience and innovation, while also “turbocharging” existing regional business growth programmes.
• Create a unified investment proposition: Bolstering the regional advanced manufacturing proposition and creating a more integrated approach to inward investment.
• Strengthen foundations for growth and scale: Address structural barriers by mapping a 10-year real estate pipeline, boosting the investment pool and closing the “automation gap” through a plan to deliver 15,000 AI and automation-skilled workers.

Making things is what the West Midlands has done brilliantly for centuries, and that remains central to our economic revival as technology transforms industry.

 

Steve Rigby and the Project MADE team have set out a clear path for how industry can unlock investment and create high-quality jobs: My job is to help overcome any barriers to growth, and I’m already backing manufacturers to modernise production, upskill their workforce and move into new markets.

 

I’ll do what I can to help turn the recommendations in this report into tens of thousands of new jobs and position our region as the advanced manufacturing engine of our nation.

– Richard Parker, Mayor of the West Midlands

Chaired by Steve Rigby, CEO of Rigby Group, Project MADE has brought together regional stakeholders, including Unipart Manufacturing, HORIBA MIRA, Midlands Aerospace Alliance, BCIC, Warwick Manufacturing Group, the Manufacturing Technology Centre, Rigby Group, West Midlands Combined Authority, West Midlands Growth Company, Coventry City Council, Coventry University and the West Midlands Investment Zone.

This excellent report is a clarion call for the West Midlands to join all its forces together for greater impact and provides a clear plan of how to do it. It aligns with the national Advanced Manufacturing Sector Plan and will support its delivery.

 

The West Midlands is advanced manufacturing’s home ground in Britain. Nowhere else has the breadth and depth of manufacturing assets – a unique ecology of manufacturers, their suppliers and suppliers to suppliers; leading universities and research and development centres that work in symbiosis with industry; specialist skills found in a young workforce; sites for development well connected with each other and the country by road and rail; direct connections to policy makers nationally and regionally.

– Rt Hon Greg Clark, Executive Chair, University of Warwick Innovation District and Member, HM Government’s Industrial Strategy Advisory Council

Innovation starts, and scales, in the West Midlands. The region operates as a fully integrated system where ideas are rapidly developed, tested and industrialised within a single regional economy. We also have one of the UK’s largest applied R&D ecosystems outside London, supported by six research-intensive universities producing over 50,000 graduates each year.

 

Project MADE will help develop the region’s advanced manufacturing sector further and ensure it remains a market leader, both nationally and internationally.

– Neil Rami, Chief Executive of the West Midlands Growth Company

While the West Midlands remains the UK’s industrial heartland, producing more manufactured goods than Greater Manchester, West Yorkshire and the Liverpool City Region combined. Continued growth, working with industry, is key to strengthening it.