This was submitted as written evidence to the UK Public Services Committee on September 23rd, 2025 as part of the Medicines security inquiry.
The UK’s medical countermeasure (MCM) supply chains remain vulnerable to a myriad of threats. Heavy reliance on China and India for MCM manufacturing makes supply chains intrinsically exposed to geopolitical risks. Such an overreliance on a few countries leads to fragile supply chains which, if disrupted by conflict or extreme weather events, could severely impact on the British public’s access to critical medicines. This could in turn lead to deterioration of quality of care, worsened patient outcomes, and loss of life. Until the UK has greater self-sufficiency and more diversified & robust supply chains (including with geographically proximate allied nations), the UK’s health security faces a strategic vulnerability.
To bolster UK supply chains and increase self-sufficiency of MCM manufacturing, The Centre for Long-Term Resilience recommends the following measures be considered by the UK Government:
1. The UK Government should seize the opportunities that come with the creation of the National Supply Chain Centre and implement a data-centralisation platform that allows for real-time monitoring of supply chains for MCMs. This will remove bottlenecks in improving supply chain resilience and ensure that key stakeholders within the UK Government can holistically assess the status of medical countermeasures present in the UK, to better inform national responses to biological events.
2. To ensure region-wide self-sufficiency and the development of complementary MCMs, the UK Government should coordinate a “friendshoring” exercise in which strategically informed industrial policy is coordinated across proximate partner nations internationally. This will ensure that a diversity of countermeasures are produced within a region (i.e. Europe).
a) Other forms of collaboration (such as aligning on procurement and tendering systems) are also recommended to make the MCM manufacturing within Europe and the UK more attractive to private industry.
3. Future sales of critical infrastructure related to MCM manufacturing should be subject to additional scrutiny, whether by Parliament or an independent reviewing body.
4. The UK Government should seek to prioritise policies which act to reduce the cost of energy and inputs, or create pools of medium- to high-risk-appetite funding for scaling up companies into more mature entities, to increase the attractiveness of the UK life science industry.
a) The UK Government should also facilitate the flow of talent into the country through preferential migration routes for high-skilled workers in pharmaceutical industries, further increasing the attractiveness of the UK to pharmaceutical companies.
5. The UK Government should encourage “clean manufacturing” of critical active pharmaceutical ingredients, as the NHS has done with the BSI Kitemark™ for Minimized Risk of AMR Certification. This presents an opportunity to drive reshoring of MCM manufacturing to the UK. Despite the currently constrained macroeconomic environment in the UK, the job creation that would ensue from this would have long-term effects on the economic situation in the UK, by creating more high-skilled jobs and an even more thriving pharmaceutical R&D and manufacturing sector in the UK.
6. Public procurement policies, including for the NHS, should be modified to stimulate manufacturing of MCMs in the UK. This could be achieved by the UK Government adding specific weightings for supply chain resilience, domestic manufacturing, and/or environmentally conscious manufacturing.
Suggested citation: Fady, Paul-Enguerrand. 2025. “Call for Evidence: Medicines Security – CLTR Response”. The Centre for Long-Term Resilience. https://doi.org/10.71172/zev1-d911
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