Critical minerals – still no action

Last December the Labour government acknowledged the need for a strategy on critical minerals. It announced a new strategy – to be ready in the spring. But there’s still no sign of it – and the delay is raising doubts and damaging Britain’s industrial interests.

Labour had plenty of criticism for the previous government, but no immediate answer about the action to be taken. Instead it seems preoccupied with net zero targets, even though these can never be met without the necessary raw materials.

Lost confidence

Businesses are losing confidence that the government will ever draw up a coherent strategy for investment, production, processing and trading in minerals. A US company Pensana has dropped plans for a rare earth processing plant on Humberside. Other key projects are likely to fall by the wayside.

Meanwhile, a stream of reports and pieces of expert advice have either been commissioned by the government or independently published. All give the impression that Labour doesn’t understand what it’s doing, hence the delay.

‘The impression is that Labour doesn’t understand what it’s doing.’

In April, Frazer-Nash Consulting, in partnership with the Critical Minerals Association and the Materials Processing Institute, produced a report for the Department for Business and Trade.

The report highlighted a number of barriers to development, including high energy costs, limited access to funding, and negative public perceptions.

Solutions

They offered solutions to these barriers. For example: extending the scope of existing energy intensive industries to cover critical minerals; introducing a new energy bill relief scheme tailored to critical minerals; matching grant funding for research and innovation; and targeting school and university outreach to facilitate positive promotion of the processing industry.

Advice

The Royal United Services Institute also weighed in with advice in September, mindful of the previous government’s having been described as “asleep at the wheel”, “sleepwalking towards national insecurity” and “lagging behind allies”.

Together with mining company Anglo American, RUSI calls for concrete, tangible, decisive action. It points out that the UK has not been exactly inactive, but the main point is that “an up-to-date overarching strategic articulation of the UK’s approach to securing critical minerals is missing in action.”