Issue 297 of Regions offered an excellent perspective on rethinking Regional Manufacturing Policy, mainly from a US perspective. It’s something we need to do in the UK as well. Birmingham and its wider region, for example, took the biggest output and employment hit of any UK region in the last recession, in part because of a collapse in world trade. However, since then the region has recovered more quickly than elsewhere in the UK (Bailey and Berkeley, 2014). This bounce back has been seen in improved performance across many sectors in the region but manufacturing activity in particular has spurred growth. Sectors such as automotive, aerospace and the production of specialised precision components are all growing rapidly. Infrastructure improvements such as the runway extension at Birmingham Airport are also likely to boost growth in the city and the wider region. As a result, West Midlands’ regional growth on a nominal Gross Value Added (GVA) basis is expected to outstrip UK national performance by at least two percentage points this year by some estimates. The performance and fl exibility of the region’s automotive industry in particular is worth highlighting. The sector has seen more than £8 billion of investment over the past three years, with much of that in the region via Jaguar Land Rover and supply chain fi rms such as GKN (whose Birmingham-based Driveline business division posted bumper profi ts last year). There is a palpable sense of confi dence in severa l manufactur ing sectors including automotive and aerospace. Order books extend well beyond 2017. “There’s never been a better time to be in manufacturing” one chief of a major local manufacturer told us recently. This confidence is ref lected in the nascent trend of reshoring, which is seeing manufacturing activity come back to the region. Our own take on things, based on research published late last year (Bailey and De Propris, 2014), is that reshoring really is happening but on a smaller scale than many have claimed, with around one in six local fi rms actually doing it. Top of the list of drivers for local fi rms in ‘bringing it home’ are transport costs and quality issues overseas, followed by supply chain resilience, exchange rate shifts, rising wages overseas, the need for rapid turnaround, as well as the need to offer a service alongside manufacturing. There are, of course, barriers to further repatriation. It’s the skills issue, along with access to f inance (especially for smaller f irms down the supply chain) and high energy costs which provide some of the biggest barriers to an even faster manufacturing upturn and a boost to growth locally. Tackling these would also help local fi rms export more. (See Table 1). Rapid lead times are critical in sectors such as clothing, textiles and high design content items, where fashions can change quickly and retailers try to avoid having stock in transit for long periods. Indeed, the increased variety and speed of change associated with ‘fast fashion’ have tilted the balance of competitive advantage towards fi rms nearer ‘home’. For such reasons, the f irm Bathrooms.com, an online retailer of bathroom furniture, is bringing back around half of the contracts currently awarded to Chinese manufacturers to Midlands’ f irms, in turn reducing the time from design to production from six months to six weeks. Another example of reshoring sees RDM Group, the Coventry-based engineering and automotive specialist, starting production at a new Coventry