How can we understand what it takes to manufacture the products that define our present - and our future - if we don't study the materials that go into them and where they come from? That's the question that drove Ed Conway, Economics and Data Editor at Sky News, to research and write MATERIAL WORLD, one of the top-selling business books of the last year. But what started as a project driven by intellectual curiosity ended up forcing him to question the fundamentals of economic and industrial policy that have been taken for granted for decades in the UK - and to fear for our national security unless a serious reappraisal of those policies is carried out.

In 2023 a new conference landed called Women With Metal, conceived and directed by Kirsty Davies-Chinnock, MD of Professional Polishing Services in the West Midlands. On this edition of The Production Line, we're joined by Kirsty and by two of the 2024 conference speakers: Steph Snade, founder of the Limitless Leadership Academy and Jeremy Stockdale, founder of Ylead.Topic: breaking down the workplace barriers and systems (created by men over decades) and making the shop floor free from sexism, unconscious bias (and conscious!) and reaping the ultimate dividend of a wider talent pool. Hang onto your hats, it's a great conversation! Find out more: https://womenwithmetal.com/

The latest Make UK statistical snapshot of UK manufacturing, the 2024 Fact Card, shows the UK slipping out of the world Top Ten for the first time in years - perhaps ever.

But as this discussion with Make UK's Policy Director Verity Davidge and Bath University's Professor Michael Lewis shows, it is the result of seismic shifts in the world economy rather than a weakness in UK manufacturing.

And yet at the same time, those world events demand an urgent reappraisal of what we make in the UK and how we make it.

And what role government needs to play in that via its new industrial strategy.