UK Deindustrialisation: British Industry in Decline

Deindustrialisation is usually described as a slow process, but the UK's version has been unusually deep and, lately, unusually fast. The country that invented the factory now makes less, employs fewer people to make it, and has watched its flagship industries close one by one. Here are the numbers, each drawn from an official or authoritative source.

The long retreat

From a third of the economy to under a tenth

The scale of the shift is hard to overstate. Manufacturing contributed about 30 percent of UK output in 1970, falling to 23.4 percent by 1979 and continuing down from there. An activity that once defined the economy has become a minority pursuit within it.¹

The first in, among the first out

Britain's path is historically extreme. Manufacturing and related industry made up roughly 48 percent of the economy in 1948 but only around 13 percent by 2013. As the first country to industrialise, the UK has also been among the first and fastest to deindustrialise.²

Less than half the German share

The gap with peers is stark. In 2024 manufacturing was worth just 8.0 percent of UK GDP, against 17.8 percent in Germany, more than double the British share. Two advanced European economies have made opposite choices about making things.³

The jobs that vanished

Six million manufacturing jobs gone

The human scale is enormous. Manufacturing employment peaked at around 8.9 million in 1966, close to 30 percent of all UK jobs, and has since shed more than 6 million posts. Whole towns were built around work that no longer exists.⁴

Down to 2.6 million

What remains is a fraction of that. UK manufacturing now supports about 2.6 million jobs, still a significant employer, but a shadow of the industrial workforce of the post-war decades.⁵

From a quarter of jobs to a twentieth

The share fell as fast as the numbers. In 1980 about 25 percent of UK jobs were in manufacturing; by 2010 that had fallen to 8.2 percent. Services filled the gap, but rarely in the same places or at the same pay.⁶

Falling down the world league

Out of the top 10 producers

Britain's global standing has slipped. The UK fell to 12th in the world manufacturing output rankings, dropping out of the top 10 for the first time, behind economies it once dwarfed. The workshop of the world is now a mid-table player.⁷

A shrinking slice of global output

The long trend is unambiguous. In the late 1990s the UK was the fifth-largest producer with about 4 percent of world manufacturing output; by 2015 it was eighth, with just 2.1 percent. Global industry grew, and Britain's share of it fell.⁸

Still below the 2008 peak

Even in absolute terms, output has not recovered. A decade after the financial crisis, UK manufacturing output was still about 2.7 percent below its early-2008 level, and the index of production has stayed weak since. This is not a story of making more with fewer people, it is making less.⁹

Steel, the symbol

Output at a 1930s low

No industry captures the decline like steel. UK crude steel output fell 29 percent to just 4.0 million tonnes in 2024, down from 7.6 million in 2018. It was the lowest level of production since the Great Depression of the 1930s.¹⁰

A net importer of its own steel

Britain increasingly buys the steel it once exported. By 2024 around 70 percent of the steel the UK uses was imported, up from 60 percent a year earlier. A country that cannot make its own steel is a country that has outsourced its industrial base.¹¹

The furnaces have gone out at Port Talbot

The closures are physical and final. Tata Steel shut the last blast furnace at Port Talbot in September 2024, ending more than a century of primary steelmaking there, with up to 2,800 jobs cut. When the fires go out at a plant that size, they rarely come back.¹²

The last of the virgin steelmakers

Only emergency action kept the other one alive. The government spent 377 million pounds in nine months to keep British Steel's Scunthorpe furnaces running in 2025, the UK's last site able to make virgin steel from iron ore, without which Britain would be the only G20 nation unable to produce its own.¹³

Why it keeps happening

The highest industrial energy costs in the developed world

Behind many closures sits one number. UK industrial electricity is the most expensive of any country reporting to the International Energy Agency, several times the US level. For energy-hungry industries like steel, glass and chemicals, that cost gap is often the difference between staying and leaving.¹⁴

Still contracting today

The decline is not history, it is current. The UK manufacturing PMI fell to 46.2 in September 2025, well below the 50 mark that separates growth from contraction, with output shrinking at its fastest in months and forecasters expecting a further contraction in 2026. The retreat is ongoing.¹⁵

Our read: decline ends in the insolvency register

Deindustrialisation is not an abstraction, it is thousands of individual business failures. Manufacturing is consistently among the sectors most exposed to high energy costs and weak demand, and that exposure surfaces directly in the insolvency data. You can watch it happen, company by company, in the latest UK insolvencies; tracking it early is exactly what the InsolvencyRadar service is built for.¹⁶