The UK Can’t Afford to Lose Its Textile Skills, And the Defence Sector Knows It.
Our Managing Director recently had the privilege of attending the second Make UK Defence Textile Working Group, hosted at the Toray Textiles Europe facility, and it was one of those days that serves as a timely reminder of why conversations like this matter so much.
Huge thanks to Graham Dobson from Carrington Textiles and Dan Parvaz from Make UK Defence for leading what was a genuinely open, honest and productive discussion around resilience, readiness and the future of UK textile manufacturing. And for keeping the room on track when the conversation threatened to disappear into the weeds, which, given the passion on display, was never far away.
A particular acknowledgement too to Andrew Kinniburgh, Director General of Make UK Defence, for being present and listening. The value of a room like that depends on whether the right things get taken to the right places, and we hope what was discussed that day finds its way to government. Because it needs to.
What Toray's Facility Showed
Touring Toray’s manufacturing site was genuinely impressive — if not a little deafening. Capable of producing 20 million metres of fabric per year, it stands as a powerful demonstration of what UK textile manufacturing resilience actually looks like in practice: scale, capability, innovation and the infrastructure to deliver critical materials when they’re needed. It’s the kind of facility that should make any procurement decision-maker pause and think carefully about what we have in this country, and what we stand to lose if we don’t protect it.
The Issue That Stood Out Most: Skilled Workers
Several important topics were on the table throughout the day, but the one that stayed with our MD most was the growing and accelerating loss of skilled workers across the cutting, sewing and textile manufacturing sector.
It’s a problem without a quick fix. The skills involved in textile manufacturing, the precision, craft and technical knowledge required to produce to the standards defence applications demand, take years to develop. They’re not easily automated. They’re not easily imported at short notice when a supply chain crisis forces the issue. And right now, we’re losing the people who carry them.
At Specialised Covers, we see this challenge every single day. Training, retaining and recruiting people with the specialist skills needed to manufacture items like protective covers, uniforms, bedding and parachutes is one of our most consistent operational challenges. Finding people with existing ability is hard. Developing it takes time and genuine investment. And when that knowledge walks out of the door, it’s extraordinarily difficult to replace.
The Government’s Role and the Missed Opportunity of Covid
The honest question that has to be asked is this: why are contracts for MOD-essential textile products, uniforms, bedding, protective equipment, parachutes, being handed to overseas suppliers when UK manufacturers exist who can produce them?
These aren’t luxury items. These are operational necessities. And offshoring the manufacturing of operational necessities is, at best, negligent. At worst, it’s a strategic vulnerability that the next crisis will expose in ways that will be very difficult to recover from quickly.
Covid offered a moment. A genuine, national lesson in what happens when domestic capability has been allowed to atrophy, and then suddenly needs to be called upon. Many in manufacturing hoped that lesson would stick, that it would shift procurement thinking away from “cheapest supplier globally” and towards “resilient domestic supply chain.”
For the most part, it hasn’t. And that represents a significant failure of strategic thinking.
The path forward isn’t complicated: if the UK government proactively chose British-made textile products for MOD procurement, it would do more than support manufacturers. It would sustain the training pipelines, the workforce, the skills base and the industrial capacity that defence resilience actually depends on. The demand signal matters enormously. Without it, the economics of maintaining that capability become harder to justify every year.
Changing How We See These Skills
There’s a cultural shift that needs to happen alongside the policy one, and manufacturers have a role in driving it.
We have to stop describing cutting, sewing and textile manufacturing as “traditional” skills. That framing, however unintentionally, positions them as relics of a previous era of industry. It’s exactly the wrong message to send to the next generation of potential skilled workers, to schools and colleges making curriculum decisions, and to a government deciding where to direct industrial support.
These are critical future capabilities. The combination of craftsmanship, technical knowledge and increasingly sophisticated technology that defines modern textile manufacturing is genuinely advanced work. It sits at the intersection of materials science, precision engineering and skilled human judgement, and it is not easily automated or replicated elsewhere.
If we want the UK to remain competitive and resilient in defence manufacturing, we need to reframe these skills accordingly, and back that reframing with investment, procurement policy and long-term thinking. Better to do it by choice now than by necessity later.
What Happens If We Don’t
There’s a concept in defence and emergency planning called “Break Glass” a capability held in reserve for use only when a genuine crisis forces the issue. A last resort. A recognition that something critical has been allowed to run down to the point where it can only be accessed in an emergency.
The UK textile manufacturing sector is drifting toward that territory. Days like the one at Toray are a reminder that the expertise, the passion and the world-class capability still exist here, but the conditions that sustain them are under real pressure, and the window for proactive intervention is narrowing.
Our MD came away from the day encouraged by the calibre of people in that room, and by the shared recognition that these issues are real and felt across the sector. Nobody in UK textile manufacturing is dealing with these challenges in isolation, the same pressures around skills, procurement and the need for government understanding are felt universally.
What’s needed now is for that shared understanding to translate into real policy change. Before we reach the crossroads that makes change unavoidable.
“If the UK wants resilient defence manufacturing, it cannot afford to lose the next generation of skilled textile workers.”
Specialised Covers Ltd manufactures protective covers, enclosures and specialist textile products for defence, industrial, automotive and leisure applications from our UK facility. To find out more about our defence capabilities, visit our defence page here.
