Public Procurement is the lever we aren’t pulling, but why? Kate Hills weighs in.
The solution we need to save British manufacturing. Andy Burnham we hope you are listening!
Image is of Kate Hills. Credit: Kate Hills.
Public Procurement is the lever we are not pulling in the UK. Our recent report, Policy Fragmentation and Place-Based Opportunity in UK Fashion and Textiles (April 2026) highlighted this as a missing link to drive local economic growth, to build resilient supply chains, and in creating green public infrastructure. Governments elsewhere are increasingly using these contracts to mandate circular production practices and bolster domestic manufacturing. So why aren’t we?
For Fashion Roundtable, the pandemic remains the ultimate case study of the cost of policy fragmentation. The Covid Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) procurement scandal has left a long-term legacy. The July 2026 Covid Inquiry Report shows that £10bn of public money was wasted on substandard or over-ordered PPE from overseas. This highlights key systemic failures: a system which bypassed British manufacturers, did not take into account data from proven textile experts; and exposed the danger of total offshoring when goods were unusable.
So how can we do better by supporting British made?
To answer this question we asked Kate Hills, the founder and CEO of Make it British to weigh in. Make it British is a platform dedicated to supporting UK manufacturers and the brands that want to make locally. Kate has spent over 30 years working in the fashion and textiles sector and is a leading UK manufacturing advocate, campaigning against policy fragmentation in the UK fashion and textiles sector. She is the host of the Make it British Podcast, a board member of Fashion Roundtable, and a trusted mentor to creative product-based businesses through her British Brand Accelerator – a 6-month programme helping founders scale their UK-made brands.
Here she talks to Meg Pirie about the current public procurement landscape, the barriers as they stand, the PPE scandal, and how the new government can do better.
Q. Over the last 30 years, how have you seen the manufacturing landscape change as public procurement practices have diminished?
What we’ve seen over the last three decades is the UK fashion and textile industry disappearing offshore, predominantly driven by the fashion industry looking for cheaper production prices. Sadly public procurement soon followed suit. This meant that consistent, volume work was lost, factories closed or scaled back, and as a result over the last 30 years, skills have been lost.
Q. What are the current operational barriers that mean British manufacturers are missing out on public procurement tenders?
The current procurement policy only requires central government departments to set targets for direct spend with SMEs, but doesn’t specify anything about the wider supply chain or where the actual manufacturing takes place. In fact, there’s no mention of manufacturing requirements at all.
So a large overseas manufacturer could easily supply products through a small UK-based trading company, and this would count towards the government’s SME spending targets. The policy focuses solely on the size of the company being directly contracted, not on where or how the products are made.
This is a fundamental flaw that actually makes things worse for UK manufacturers. Government departments might hit their SME spending targets while still sending all the real manufacturing work overseas. We saw exactly this pattern with PPE procurement – UK-based middlemen winning huge contracts only to source everything from overseas factories.
Add to this the fact that you have procurement teams with little understanding of UK manufacturing capability and a fixation on the lowest purchase price, and it means that genuine British manufacturers are missing out.
Q. Can we debunk the myth that is used to justify offshoring, that British-made is not cost-effective. How is buying British cost-effective over the product’s full lifecycle?
The idea that British-made isn’t cost-effective only works if you look at the price on the invoice and ignore everything that happens afterwards. The pandemic proved the point. The UK spent around £15 billion buying PPE from overseas, and nearly £10 billion of it was written off as unusable or over-ordered – the majority of it made in China.
Scotland is a clear example of what the alternative looks like. The Covid Inquiry found that a PPE supply chain was built there from scratch, and by April 2021 around 88% of Scotland’s PPE was domestically made. The £102.7 million invested in Scottish suppliers generated £66.7 million of additional gross value added, supported 1,400 jobs, and delivered an eight-to-one multiplier effect for local spending. Every one of the 96 new contracts awarded was successfully delivered. When you buy British, the money doesn’t disappear offshore, it comes back through wages, tax and local spending.
The tragedy is that after the pandemic, the Scottish contracts dried up and those suppliers were left without the demand to sustain them, and many closed down. This is exactly why procurement policy, not just crisis response, has to change.
Q. How can local authorities better support British manufacturers in this space?
The first thing that local authorities can do is familiarise themselves with which manufacturers are in their area, and ensure that those manufacturers hear about procurement contracts and get a decent chance to bid for them.
The second thing is to structure tenders so that they are weighted towards local jobs and supply chain resilience rather than just the lowest price.
Q. During the pandemic, you along with our CEO Tamara Cincik sounded the alarm on the Government’s catastrophic failure to utilise domestic manufacturing for personal protective equipment (PPE). Can you tell us what your proposal was, and how the government’s decision to offshore productions had long-term effects on UK manufacturing?
The proposal to Boris Johnson and Matt Hancock was that the Government mobilise the UK’s thousands of specialist textile manufacturers as a collective, with a single point of contact who actually understood the industry, full product specifications so factories could get straight to work, fair prices based on a UK living wage, and guaranteed orders and funding for re-tooling so manufacturers could plan with confidence.
What happened instead was that procurement stayed focused on China while consultants from Deloitte were brought in, and having sat in many meetings with them at the time, it was clear they had no understanding of manufacturing whatsoever. The Covid Inquiry confirms the UK Make team wasn’t properly established until April 2020, six weeks after the plans were first written, by which point it was very late and much of the PPE had been bought from China.
When UK manufacturers were finally engaged they proved exactly what the proposal said they would, meeting 82% of PPE demand by the winter of 2020, but the moment the crisis passed the contracts dried up and the factories that had invested and re-tooled were left with no further orders.
Neither Tamara nor I were interviewed for the Inquiry, so the voices of the people who were actually trying to connect manufacturers with the government at the time are missing from the official record.
Q. Our most recent report found that fashion and textiles fall into a policy gap between creative industries and manufacturing. How do you think the “Number 10 North” initiative will change the landscape and would you be for a dedicated manufacturing and textile task force to unify these fragmented policies?
When the Prime Minister stood outside Downing Street and said ‘re-industrialising Britain, using public procurement to back British industry’, he said the words that the UK textile industry has been waiting decades to hear, and Number 10 North could be where those words finally turn into action. BUT, warm words about manufacturing are nothing new, which is why a dedicated task force is essential.
Fashion and textiles have fallen down the gap between the creative industries and manufacturing for decades, with policy scattered across different departments and nobody owning the supply chain in between. So, bringing procurement, skills and industrial policy together in one place, with people from the industry actually around the table, is the only way to make sure reindustrialisation includes clothing and textiles rather than overlooking us yet again.
Q. Finally, how can the Government better support British manufacturing - what specific policy asks do you have for the new Prime Minister.
The single biggest ask is a British-made requirement in public contracts for textile goods, starting with defence and NHS uniforms, and crucially it must specify where products are manufactured, not just where the winning company is registered, otherwise the work will carry on going offshore through UK-based middlemen.
Alongside that, buying decisions need to be judged on total cost and value to the country rather than the price on the invoice, because as the Covid Inquiry showed, cheapest rarely turns out to be cheap.
Finally, UK manufacturers need long-term contracts, a visible pipeline of future work and tenders broken into sizes they can actually bid for, so they have the confidence to invest in machinery, apprenticeships and skills.
If the Prime Minister means what he said outside Downing Street about using public procurement to back British industry, this is how he can prove it to the UK fashion and textile industry.
Sign our open letter:
Fashion Roundtable have written an open letter to the Prime Minister, Andy Burnham, calling for public procurement contracts for textile goods, beginning with defence and NHS uniforms, to be awarded to suppliers who manufacture onshore in the UK.
The letter asks for a meeting with the Prime Minister before the details of the Number 10 North initiative are finalised, arguing that procurement is the fastest and most practical way to deliver on the commitments that the Prime Minister made outside Downing Street around decentralisation, reindustrialisation and rebalancing power away from Whitehall and towards the regions.
The letter calls on the Government to deliver cohesive, place-based industrial policy specifically through:
The introduction of onshoring requirements in public contracts for textile goods, beginning with defence and NHS uniforms;
The establishment of a dedicated manufacturing and textiles task force to unify fragmented policy across DCMS, DBT, Defra, MOD, DHSC and the Cabinet Office.
The letter reflects a decade of Fashion Roundtable’s work on decentralisation, reindustrialisation and public procurement, captured perfectly in its ethos of Policy. People. Place.
Read the letter below:
Dear Prime Minister,
We are writing at the forefront of the UK fashion and textile industry, an industry that contributes £62bn to UK GDP and 1.3million jobs. However the full economic value and potential of the UK fashion and textiles industry in relation to public procurement has not been fully realised and this is a missed opportunity.
With a change in leadership we feel this offers promising opportunities, and aligns with our work and core values at Fashion Roundtable.
The Prime Minister’s words outside Downing Street reinforced issues that Fashion Roundtable have been working on for the last decade: decentralisation, reindustrialisation and public procurement, and rebalancing power away from Whitehall and towards the regions. These key policies tie in with Fashion Roundtable’s ethos of Policy. People. Place.
We particularly welcome the Prime Minister’s comments:
“We will take power out of here and carry it into every postcode in the land so that they can do more. And in doing more, build a new economy where we put life’s essentials back under stronger public control to make them affordable to you again. Re-industrialising Britain, using public procurement to back British industry.”
Public Procurement was recently raised by the now Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, Chris Bryant, during the February 2026 Westminster Hall debate on onshoring fashion and textiles, stating “it would be good if more of our British servicemen and women were dressed in British uniforms”.
Further, Patrick Grant’s evidence at the 2023 Localism Ethics and Sustainability in Fashion All-Party Parliamentary Group meeting organised by Fashion Roundtable highlights this very point, stating that Britain once employed 2.5 million people in textiles, and that reviving domestic demand could allow UK factories to re-employ laid-off skilled workers.
In fact, British manufacturing was once the backbone of our economy: we grew our own natural fibres, we made our own clothing and provided uniforms for defence, the NHS and frontline services. While the 2025 Defence Industrial Strategy pledges to back British business and transform procurement to support SMEs, its focus is weapons and AI systems, not the uniforms and protective equipment worn by frontline personnel. With defence spending set to rise from 2.7% of GDP in 2027 to 5% by 2035, this is a significant missed opportunity.
In this letter, we present two policy opportunities that recognise public procurement as a key policy lever for change which we would like the Prime Minister to consider. These are 1. the introduction of onshoring requirements in public contracts for textile goods, beginning with defence and NHS uniforms; 2. The establishment of a dedicated manufacturing and textiles task force to unify fragmented policy across DCMS, DBT, Defra, MOD, DHSC and the Cabinet Office.
We present the following evidence to support this below.
Covid Personal Protective Equipment: The Case Study for Policy Fragmentation.
For Fashion Roundtable, the pandemic remains the ultimate case study of the cost of policy fragmentation. The Covid Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) procurement scandal has left a long-term legacy. The July 2026 Covid Inquiry Report shows that £10bn of public money was wasted on substandard or over-ordered PPE from overseas. This highlights key systemic failures: a system which bypassed British manufacturers, did not take into account data from proven textile experts, and exposed the danger of total offshoring when goods were unusable.
During the pandemic our CEO Tamara Cincik, worked with the Emergency Designer Network as a key policy advisor, sitting in various meetings with Government, and sounded the alarm on the Government’s catastrophic failure to utilise domestic manufacturing for PPE. Despite a full mapping of the manufacturing supply chain of UK textile manufacturers to make the PPE locally, it was rejected by the government in favour of offshore manufacturers.
Public Procurement is the Lever We Are Not Pulling in the UK.
We have an extensive body of work in relation to public procurement.
This is evident in Fashion Roundtable’s Sector Vision Manifesto (2024) where we outlined clear recommendations including targeted support for UK manufacturing and on-shoring, a commitment to the British made, strengthening of public procurement, and an investment in UK manufacturing through consistent and secure orders.
This is also apparent through our recent briefing British Wool and the Farming Roadmap for 2050: Key Recommendations to Defra Ministers on the Farming Roadmap which came to the same conclusion: procurement of British wool and homegrown fibres for Government-funded projects and uniforms is a ready-made opportunity to deliver on the Roadmap’s own commitments.
Earlier this year, Fashion Roundtable published Policy Fragmentation and Place-Based Opportunity in UK Fashion and Textiles, in partnership with University of Birmingham’s Local Policy Innovation Partnership (LPIP) Hub, which evaluated the potential of the sector to create social mobility opportunities and drive sustainable economic growth.
The key finding of the research was that the biggest lever we have to support skills retention, inclusive growth and regional resilience is awarding public procurement contracts for textile goods to suppliers who manufacture onshore in the UK. The report also found that relatively modest reforms, including longer-term contracts, clearer forecasting, accessible contract sizes and improved payment terms, could significantly strengthen local value chains while delivering social value and value for money. The stability that public procurement contracts would provide would have far reaching impacts on factories, staff, and the communities they are a part of.
Our evidence also showed that the issue with keeping our factories open isn’t a lack of skills or capabilities but that fashion and textiles fall into a policy gap between creative industries and manufacturing, which has allowed the sector to fall behind our peers from other creative industries. This leaves the industry exposed to short-term policy interventions and weak coordination across national, devolved, and local levels.
Governments elsewhere are increasingly using procurement contracts to mandate circular production practices and bolster domestic manufacturing. France’s textile industry is a shining example. A study published by the Union des Industries Textiles found that products labelled “Made in France” capture up to 84% of the value created, compared to approximately 35% for imported goods. This starkly illustrates the economic benefit of domestic production and the massive opportunity for the UK economy.
We call on the Government to deliver cohesive, place-based industrial policies specifically through:
The introduction of onshoring requirements in public contracts for textile goods, beginning with defence and NHS uniforms;
The establishment of a dedicated manufacturing and textiles task force to unify fragmented policy across DCMS, DBT, Defra, MOD, DHSC and the Cabinet Office.
We request a meeting with the Prime Minister to discuss these opportunities before the ‘Number 10 North’ initiative details are finalised.
Yours Sincerely,
Tamara Cincik, CEO, Fashion Roundtable
Fashion Roundtable is fashion’s leading think-tank and change agency.
Have a question, or would like to discuss the letter in more detail?
Email Meg Pirie, Head of Policy at meg.pirie@fashionroundtable.co.uk