27th November 2025
The Autumn Budget landed yesterday, following an early leak from the OBR, with Chancellor Rachel Reeves setting out a blueprint to strengthen the UK’s manufacturing and industrial base. Her plan centres on targeted investment, meaningful cost relief for businesses, and a renewed push for productivity and sustainable growth. Pinaki Banerjee, CEO of PP Control & Automation responds.
Overall, today’s Budget delivers welcome signals for UK manufacturing through long-term investment, sector-specific backing and commitments on energy and specifically, apprenticeships.
However, let’s not get carried away. There are still significant concerns around productivity, with very little in there to encourage investment in automation and technology and, apart from the encouraging news on funding for under 25 apprentices, a skills crisis that hasn’t really been fully addressed.
In fact, the deeper you investigate the announcements, many of the key policies give a little bit with one hand but then take away with another. For example, a strong commitment to nuclear is welcome, yet there was little additional clarity on timelines for grid reform, hydrogen rollout, CCS clusters or renewable supply-chain commitments.
Devolution and more regional funding can boost ecosystems and local supply chains, yet more details on the much vaunted Industrial Strategy and its implementation was glaringly missing from the speech.
Pinaki was also interviewed for an ITV News Autumn Budget segment, which can be watched on demand below.
Ian Knight, Chief Information Officer at PP Control & Automation (PP C&A) challenges the prevailing, often vague narrative around AI adoption and reframes the conversation around a more practical starting point: operational constraints.
Artificial intelligence is no longer a distant concept for manufacturers. It is already being explored across quotation, production planning, engineering, quality, supply chain and customer service functions. Yet, for many organisations, the gap between experimentation and meaningful operational impact remains difficult to close.
A leading aquaculture specialist – that is changing the way fish are vaccinated safely – has signed a major manufacturing deal.
On paper, defined discipline-specific suppliers can look organised. However, every additional supplier introduces another handoff, and every handoff creates another point where time, quality, communication and accountability can be lost.
Very rarely does growth not surface because an OEM lacks ambition. Shortcomings arise because operating models built to support such ambition don’t evolve quickly enough.
Recent weeks have brought two important industry moments into sharp focus, concluding that demand for AI and automation is rising, but investment, skills, and long-term thinking must follow.
For decades, one question has sat at the heart of operational strategy for machine builders and OEMs: make or buy? It’s a familiar debate and it isn’t the wrong question by any means, but perhaps it is an incomplete one.
In most machine building businesses, change is still treated as an exception. A late-stage drawing revision, component substitution, or wiring tweak discovered during build. Each one is handled, resolved, and signed off. And then everyone moves on. But what if that’s the wrong way to think about it? What if change isn’t the disruption to the system but the system itself?
