Between where critical materials come from and where they are used.
Building the capabilities behind UK security and resilience.
Mantle identifies, catalyses and accelerates the build-out of the critical sovereign capabilities central to the UK’s future security and resilience.
Resources, manufacturing and technology. Connected into capability.
Mantle invests in and develops the UK’s natural-resource supply chains, along with the manufacturing and technological capabilities needed to underpin the defence, energy and infrastructure sectors.
Mantle also builds the ecosystems behind home-grown jobs and growth. This means creating the requisite systems integration between networks, infrastructure and technologies to help our companies scale their operations, become nationally impactful, and reduce reliance on non-domestic competitors.
Our work is about
securing connections.
Between the companies and people that need each other to grow.
Between government and private enterprise.
To ensure that the UK’s national security objectives are paired with the agility and ingenuity the UK possesses.
The problem Mantle is addressing
Geopolitical volatility is no longer episodic, but a feature of a persistently disrupted operating environment.
Trading routes are becoming less predictable
With sanctions, regulatory changes and active chokepoints adding new complexity and costs.
Security risks are moving closer to home
Conflict is no longer separated from the home nation with the lines between defence and civilian life increasingly blurred.
Impacts persist long after shocks
Disruption comes quickly, but the commercial consequences are persisting for years through higher costs, investment shifts, and changing customer behaviour.
International partnerships are becoming more fragile
In particular, critical technologies and resources once shared among allies are now closely guarded advantages.
Untapped UK capability
Much of the UK’s ability to meet these challenges also lies untapped or underutilised.
Potential to harness greater public-private partnerships
Where shared access to infrastructure, assets and data could enhance value.
Knowledge and resource pooling limited
By corporate competition and short-term financial targets, rather than unlocked by systems thinking.
Blind spots across supply chains
Where vested interests and cheap imported components have obscured where domestic capability could be built.
Talent and capital not always deployed
To where they could have the greatest impact.
The two core challenges
Our government and public institutions need support to operate with the pace and coordination required to meet the two core challenges that will determine the UK’s ability to effectively navigate repeated disruption.
Building secure supply chains for essential raw materials
The UK produces just 6% of the critical minerals required to meet domestic demand.
The UK has built up extreme import concentrations for resources that are foundational to our industrial and defence needs. Foreign dependence at this scale makes the base of the UK’s national security extremely vulnerable to decisions taken by others without the supply chain resilience or stockpiles to absorb a serious shock.
Establishing sovereign manufacturing & systems integration capabilities
Only 38% of UK manufacturers are able to ramp up production within three months.
While the UK is a leader in some areas of advanced manufacturing, we still lack ability to scale industrial production at pace. Even where scale is deliverable, the UK still lacks the integration capability to knit new technologies into the legacy systems that make up our defence and national security infrastructure.
From strategic intent
to working capability.
Mantle exists to help connect strategic intent, resources, companies, infrastructure, expertise and capital into working sovereign capability.
What We Do