To achieve true reindustrialisation, government industrial strategies must involve equipment finance providers from the outset to ensure businesses can afford the machinery they need, says Shanika Amarasekara

Just over a week ago ministers announced £700m to unlock up to ten major industrial and commercial sites. Welcome news. But as the dust settles on that announcement, I’m keen that we ask the necessary, but less glamorous follow-up question: Once those sites are ready, how will the businesses moving in pay for the equipment?

Industrial policy needs to connect the places businesses operate in, with the equipment that makes them productive. 

Take Datum Tool Design in Northern Ireland. The aerospace specialist needed a £3.1m five-axis machining centre with a 22m bed. Paragon Bank provided £1.6m towards it. The firm can now bring more complex work in-house and compete for bigger contracts.

There’s a familiar dilemma here. A manufacturer may have the orders for a new production line but not the cash to buy it outright without eating into money needed for wages and materials. Leasing and hire purchase spread that cost.

In the year to September 2026, FLA members provided £42bn in asset finance to UK businesses, including more than £25bn to SMEs. Our new research estimates that lending was associated with £28.2bn in gross value added and some 350,000 jobs. 

And that money buys very different things. A family dairy farm in West Wales used £360,000 towards a robotic milking parlour that can milk 50 cows at once. A drinks producer bought three bottling machines after securing supermarket contracts.

The regional pattern is also quite revealing. New asset finance was equivalent to 2.8 per cent of Northern Ireland’s gross value added and 2.6 per cent of Wales’s, against just 0.8 per cent in London. Yorkshire and the West Midlands were close to three times London’s figure. This is where costly physical equipment plays an especially important role in business investment.

Ministers don’t need to pay for every new lathe or bottling machine themselves. But they do need to understand what it takes for a business to make that investment

The £700m scheme aims to tackle barriers around planning, grid connections and access to finance. Sensible. But getting an industrial site ready is only one part of the job we’ve got on our hands. Businesses must still find a way to equip it.

Ministers don’t need to pay for every new lathe or bottling machine themselves. But they do need to understand what it takes for a business to make that investment. Winning a major contract is one thing. Finding the money for the production line needed to fulfil it, without draining cash needed elsewhere, is another.

That’s why I’d like to see equipment finance providers involved in regional industrial plans from the outset, alongside developers and infrastructure providers. Ask businesses what they need to buy, when they need it and what might prevent them from investing. If those questions are left until the factory is built, we’ve started the conversation too late.

Ribbon-cutting of a new site always makes for a good photograph. But if we are to truly reindustrialise then what matters is what comes off the production line afterwards.

Shanika Amarasekara is chief executive of the Finance & Leasing Association