The Growth Mission: A blueprint for scaling up SME manufacturers
March 2025
Small and medium-sized businesses are the backbone of the UK economy – out of the roughly 250,000 active manufacturing businesses in the UK, 99% of them are micro and small-to-medium companies.
Almost two thirds of these SMEs have ambitions to grow into large businesses over the next decade, which, if realised, could add £83 billion in value to the manufacturing and help propel the UK from the 12th largest economy in the world to the seventh.
This is according to a new report by Make UK and Civitas, written in partnership with the ERA Foundation – The Growth Mission: A Blueprint for Scaling up SME Manufacturers. As well as revealing their ambitions, the report outlines the challenges stopping SMEs from scaling up.
For example, 4/5 say they struggle to access finance during the ‘make or break’ seed to early growth stages of investment, a challenge which, if solved, could boost UK manufacturing investment by £9.2 billion annually.
While common sector challenges persist around skills, labour, and exports, a significant and perhaps more easily rectified issue is the large awareness gap among SMEs of the very support schemes designed to help them scale up and grow. 33% of them do not know about the Business Growth Fund, while 37% are unaware of the British Business Bank, amongst others, meaning that they’re missing out on potential investment also worth £9.2 billion.
To correct these issues and help SMEs scale up, the report makes a number of recommendations to Government, including:
- Creating an Estonia-style British business Bürokratt software tool to pool data collected by HMRC and ONS, to help micro-target support to identified companies.
- Introducing a super-growth allowance (150% annual allowance).
- Establishing an enhanced Growth Enterprise Scheme (GEIS) to boost SME scale-up efforts.
To read our other recommendations to policymakers and manufacturers, download the full report below.
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