Reshoring Britain’s manufacturing growth requires embedding cyber resilience from the start

Britain’s push to bring more manufacturing home is being welcomed by ministers and industry alike, but new factories built on UK soil will not automatically be safer, stronger or more competitive. The real test of resilience, warns Frank Roidl of Getronics, is whether digital and operational systems are designed in from the start rather than bolted on later.

That argument matters because reshoring is no longer just a political slogan. The Government’s Advanced Manufacturing...

Sector Plan aims to almost double annual business investment in the sector, with priority given to automotive, aerospace, batteries and advanced materials. For manufacturers, the attraction is obvious: shorter supply chains, a deeper domestic skills base and less exposure to geopolitical shocks. Yet the recent wave of cyber incidents affecting industrial groups has shown that proximity alone does not equal security.

According to a recent Make UK study reported by IT Pro, nearly 30% of manufacturers experienced a cyber incident in the past year, while only about half had an incident response plan in place. Around a third either lacked cyber insurance or were unsure whether they were covered. The findings underline a wider problem in British industry: many firms still treat cyber resilience as a specialist IT matter rather than a core production issue.

That separation is increasingly artificial. On a modern plant floor, a factory can be technically operational while still being unable to dispatch orders, print labels, confirm quality checks or arrange transport. In practice, that means a failure in business software, networking or recovery planning can halt output just as effectively as a breakdown in machinery.

The cyberattack on Jaguar Land Rover in 2025 made that dependence painfully clear. According to the Cyber Monitoring Centre, the disruption cost the UK economy about £1.9 billion and affected more than 5,000 organisations, from suppliers and dealerships to logistics firms and local businesses. JLR later said some systems were back online as it moved through a phased restart, but the wider damage had already spread through its supply base. Reports from the time showed plants in the UK and overseas were shut for weeks, while smaller suppliers were left under severe financial strain.

KP Snacks offers another cautionary example. After a ransomware attack in 2022, the company saw disruption to manufacturing and shipping, with retailers warned that shortages could last for weeks. The lesson is not simply that production can stop. It is that the commercial fallout often continues long after the line restarts, as companies work to regain shelf space, rebuild customer confidence and restore delivery schedules.

For businesses reshoring production, this means spending decisions should be driven by risk, not by what is easiest to see on a budget sheet. New machinery is visible; secure connectivity, recovery arrangements, network separation and tested backups are not. But the less visible layers are often the ones that determine whether a site can keep working when something goes wrong.

The same applies to suppliers. Bringing production closer to home may reduce distance, but it does not remove dependence on third parties. Manufacturers still need to know whether partners can recover from disruption, how quickly they can restore critical systems and what happens if a key application or connection fails. As the JLR incident showed, a problem at one large customer can cascade rapidly through thousands of smaller firms.

Reshoring therefore offers a rare chance to avoid repeating old mistakes. If Britain wants new manufacturing capacity to last, digital infrastructure, operational technology and cyber planning must be treated as part of the factory itself, not as an afterthought.

Source: Noah Wire Services