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Britain is talking seriously about reindustrialisation again. But do we know our own industrial capabilities well enough to decide what to retain, what to build and where to invest?

In 1940, Britain had to answer a version of that question and found it couldn't. Government set up an Industrial Capacity Committee, working through regional boards and local knowledge to find unused and latent capacity across the country. Eighty years later we are asking it again, with vastly better tools and far less urgency.

Rob Gilbert argues that we still can't answer it well enough, and that this is a state capacity problem rather than a data one. He explains why deployment investment doesn't automatically create domestic industrial capability, and what better industrial intelligence would mean for four things: spending public money more precisely, commercialising British innovation, attracting international manufacturers, and connecting productive capabilities across sectors that we currently treat as separate.

Along the way: the closure of the UK's last continuous filament glass fibre plant in Wigan, the government's Global Supply Chains Intelligence Programme, and a surgical robotics exercise that found twenty-nine times as many relevant British businesses as conventional analysis.

Britain cannot manufacture everything. It has to choose. But those choices only work if we understand what this country can already make, and what it could make next.

How We Build Britain explores how Britain can rebuild its industrial strength through energy, infrastructure, investment and production.

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In June 1897, the Royal Navy assembled the greatest fleet in the world at Spithead for Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee. Among the vessels in attendance was a small experimental boat from the Tyne called Turbinia.

By the end of the day, she was the star of the show. Powered by Charles Parsons' steam turbine, an engine the Admiralty had been slow to take seriously, she raced past the assembled fleet at thirty-four knots, and nothing there could match her. Nine years later, HMS Dreadnought launched with Parsons turbines. Within a generation, the same technology was generating the world's electricity.

Parsons didn't just invent the turbine. He engineered, built and tested it on one river. This episode asks why that connection between invention and production once defined British industry, where it survives today, and what it should teach us now.

Along the way: how Sheffield turned a clockmaker's frustration into a century of steel, why the economist Alfred Marshall said industrial knowledge lived "in the air", what happened to graphene after Manchester discovered it, and why Derby, Barrow and the Tyne still hold the pattern that built Britain.

It ends with four tests for deciding what Britain should build next.

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Has Brexit damaged UK industry?

Ten years on from the referendum, the debate is still dominated by politics. But what does the evidence actually show?

In this episode, Rob Gilbert examines the Brexit balance sheet for British industry. He looks at the impact on trade, productivity and investment, and explores what the new trading relationship has meant for automotive, agriculture and food, chemicals, pharmaceuticals, defence and financial services.

The evidence points to a real economic cost, particularly for goods-producing sectors and smaller exporters. But Brexit did not begin Britain’s industrial decline, and many of the constraints blamed on Brussels were in fact the result of domestic political choices.

The episode also considers the opportunities created by regulatory autonomy, new trade agreements and greater freedom to support strategic industries — and why those freedoms have yet to produce a meaningful industrial dividend.

The central question is no longer whether Brexit was right or wrong. It is how Britain now works with its European allies, uses its independence where it creates genuine value, and rebuilds the industrial capability on which prosperity, security and national power depend.