PROCESS PERSPECTIVES
MACH: READING THE REAL STATE OF UK MANUFACTURING
This month, we hear from Phillip Townend, Chair, MACH Organising Committee, Manufacturing Technologies Association (MTA), about what makes the MACH show so different
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’ve spent the best part of three decades walking exhibition floors, and there’s a particular kind of conversation you only get at MACH. It isn’t the polished pitch you hear in a sales meeting, and it isn’t the guarded caution of a boardroom. It’s engineers, machine shop owners and supply
chain directors telling you, plainly, what’s actually happening in their businesses. That’s what makes MACH different from any other gathering in this industry’s calendar, and it’s why, when the MTA wants to take the temperature of UK manufacturing, we don’t need to commission an expensive piece of research from a consultancy in the City. We simply ask the people standing on our own stands. This year’s advanced Snap survey, gathered from 358 businesses prior to MACH 2026, produced a stand-out statistic that should make every policy- maker in Whitehall sit up. Seventy- four per cent of respondents told us they would be willing to do more to build UK capacity in defence, energy and transport – precisely the sectors this country keeps insisting it wants to be sovereign in. That is not a modest majority. That is an industry, in its own words, putting its hand up and volunteering.
Read the next line of the survey, though, and the picture gets more complicated, and more useful. Only a quarter of those willing businesses said they could meet increased demand immediately. Others told us it would take up to six months to be in a position to help. And when we asked what stood in the way, the answers were consistent: access to funding first, then a lack of space, the cost of finance, and the wider economic uncertainty that has been hanging over the sector for longer than any of us would like. That is not a complaint. It’s a specification. Our exhibitors have told government, in numbers, exactly what would unlock capacity that already wants to exist: grants, sharper tax incentives for capital investment, competitive energy and continued support for training. If I had thirty seconds with the Chancellor, that’s the slide I’d put in front of him.
Which brings me to why MACH still matters, well over a century since the first exhibition in this lineage opened its doors in 1912, and more than a hundred years since the MTA itself was founded. It would be easy to assume an event with that kind of history has become a heritage piece – a trade show that survives on nostalgia and free coffee. I’d argue the opposite. The reason MACH has outlasted two world
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wars, every recession since, and successive waves of technological upheaval is that it does one job better than anything else on the calendar: it puts government, investors and the press in the same hall as the people who actually make things, at the exact
“ MACH 2028
will be the perfect platform for Andy Burnham to personally touch base with the cream of the industry
moment those people are deciding whether to invest in the next machine or hold their nerve. You cannot get that from a report sent round by email. You have to be in the room. And the timing this year could hardly be sharper. The new Chancellor, John Healey, is finalising the Autumn Budget he is due to deliver on 28 October - in effect, this parliament’s first proper spending review moment, and the clearest test yet of how Andy Burnham’s government intends
” PROCESS & CONTROL ENGINEERING | OCTOBER 2026 PROCESS & CONTROL ENGINEERING | OCTOBER 2026
to turn its talk of growth and sovereign capability into hard numbers on a page. Manufacturers have already told the Treasury, through our submission and through this survey, exactly what they need to see. The question, with the Budget imminent, is whether anyone at the Treasury is reading it. I don’t say any of this as a lobbyist with a grievance. I say it as someone who now chairs the committee that puts this show on every two years, and who has watched, edition after edition, exhibitors turn up in force even when the economy gives them every reason not to. The Committee, made up of MTA Members, meets regularly, therefore giving the association yet another temperature check of the industry as well as constantly being in touch with its members. Rebookings for MACH 2028 are already running
strong. That, to me, is the real headline figure. It tells you that an industry which has been asked to do an enormous amount, with a need for support still believes in its own future enough to book the stand two years out. MACH 2028 will be the perfect platform for Andy Burnham to personally touch base with the cream of the industry having got the delivery of the industrial strategy in full swing. The MTA’s job, and mine, is to make sure that confidence isn’t wasted on us. Our task now is to carry what we heard on the show floor into the rooms where the Budget is being written, and to keep doing it until the numbers in our survey and the numbers in the government’s spending plans finally start to match.
machexhibition.com
www.mta.org.uk
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