Making Scotland's future - a recovery plan for manufacturing: June 2021 - final

Priority areas and identified actions

Making Scotland's Future: A Recovery Plan For Manufacturing has been developed by sub-groups focusing on four priority areas.

1. Collaboration and networks – promoting collaboration across the sector in Scotland and beyond to maximise sales, particularly exports, and building networks to support the sharing of knowledge, ideas, capability and best practice.

2. Supply chains and competitiveness – supporting businesses of all sizes to develop stronger and new supply chains and to access new opportunities.

3. Adaptation and transformation – identifying transformative solutions that enable the sector to be more resilient, productive, digitally enabled, sustainable and competitive, and to become truly world-class.

4. Skills and workforce – in line with Fair Work and Just Transition principles, enhancing workforce development to respond to the emergence of new technologies, whilst safeguarding and creating high-quality, green jobs.

The sub-groups have brought together expertise from the public and private sectors (a full list of those involved is at Annex 1) and identified actions to be taken forward by the end of 2021.

Paul Sheerin, Chief Executive, Scottish Engineering

"The scale and speed of the downturn this global pandemic has brought to our economy has been startling, and Scotland’s engineering manufacturing sector has been no different in experiencing the impact as demand fell and international supply chains ground to a halt overnight. A challenge of this magnitude demands a response that is ambitious, coordinated and uses all the available existing expertise whilst actively seeking new pathways to turn adversity into opportunity.

"This manufacturing recovery plan aims to fulfil that ambition by concentrating on four key pillars that the sector will recognise as critical in normal times, and even more so in our current challenging situation. By focusing and coordinating Scotland’s excellent matrix of support organisations, and working in partnership with industry, the actions of this plan will enable manufacturers to do what they do best: adapt, transform and continuously improve to ensure sustainable recovery of a sector that is critical to Scotland’s economic wellbeing."