Britain’s new Critical Minerals Strategy: From sustainability to security

The Memorandum | No. 01.2026

Image generated using Artificial Intelligence

As conflict and discontent unravel the guiding assumptions of liberal globalisation, geopolitical competition for control over physical infrastructure, technologies and resources increasingly shapes the future. The scales have fallen from the eyes of those in free and open nations who believed that the temporary post-1989 period of peace and harmony meant that their nations could survive on services alone.

A post-liberal political economy is emerging, whereby national and economic security are intertwined. In November 2025, His Majesty’s (HM) Government outlined how the United Kingdom (UK) will position itself in this changing context with the long-awaited Critical Minerals Strategy (CMS).

States are rebuilding their industrial bases to secure supply chains as global trade fractures, seeking to acquire the material foundations of digital transformation, re-establish their defence manufacturing capability and energise the Net Zero transition by accelerating green industries. In particular, access to the metals and materials which drive digitalisation, decarbonisation and defence reindustrialisation are determining who makes and who breaks the future of capitalism.

The new focus on sectors such as critical minerals as part of these transformations expresses a shift from an ‘anywhere’ economy of services and global supply chains to a ‘somewhere’ economy based on resources and assets rooted in place. It has emerged that these resources and assets are no longer seen straightforwardly in terms of the contribution they make to sustainability, but in terms of their strategically pivotal role in security.

The first Critical Minerals Strategy was published in 2022. Against a backdrop of pandemic and great power rivalry, it set out plans for supply chain security over metals and materials, largely through the prism of international trade and development rather than domestic production – something continued in the early pronouncements of the current government.

The first iteration of the Modern Industrial Strategy, for example, had little to nothing to say about the subject. As a consequence of a substantial weight of consultation responses received on that initial Green Paper, the revised version recognised the existence of critical minerals clusters in every corner of the country and, crucially, their capacity to generate high‑wage, high‑skilled jobs in working-class communities. Most significantly, the Strategy also carved out space for minerals, metals and other materials through a new definition of ‘foundational industries’ that underpin the eight more exclusive growth‑driving sectors which anchored its original iteration, including digital, energy and defence.

The National Security Strategy, published in June 2025, subsequently reinforced the central role that critical minerals can play within a strategic reset. Critical minerals are explicitly named as a key terrain on which competition to shape the future of science and technology will play out, with ‘national champions’ stimulated by private-public partnerships becoming an increasingly prevalent model for how countries secure access and advantage.

The new CMS consolidates these forward steps. While the previous iteration centred on securing international supply for the green transition, the new version broadens the scope beyond sustainability to focus on the security granted by sovereign capability and offers a vision for how mineral wealth can build the UK’s power and influence in a fractured world. Minerals such as tin, copper, lithium, nickel and tungsten are presented as essential to Britain’s national security in terms of defence, economic resilience and capacity to play a leading role in the digital and green transitions.

To support this potential, the CMS commits to domestic extraction, refining and recycling as pillars of sovereign capability – not only with respect to sustainability, but in search of security amid an epoch of conflict and competition. The designation of ‘criticality’, in the case of critical minerals, is determined as much by geopolitical constraints on supply as it is by the physical availability of the materials themselves. The requirement to account for geopolitical, ethical and ecological risks in how the UK procures and produces minerals central to decarbonisation, digital transition and defence demands that Britain and its allies and partners source them from closer to home where possible.

In Britain, sources of critical minerals span the length and breadth of the country. In particular, Cornwall is a historical hotbed of world-leading mineral wealth which demonstrates the UK’s potential across three key resources with applications in everything that powers and protects the country…

Importantly, the new CMS sets out an ambitious target that 10% of national demand be met domestically and, in what marks a significant development upon the previous version, advances commitments on stockpiling for defence purposes. The UK’s geology is here a source of potential strength and advantage.

In Britain, sources of critical minerals span the length and breadth of the country. In particular, Cornwall – home to the Critical Minerals Challenge Centre – is a historical hotbed of world-leading mineral wealth which demonstrates the UK’s potential across three key resources with applications in everything that powers and protects the country; from energy infrastructure to defence technology.

Lithium grabs a lot of the headlines, but Cornwall has globally and regionally significant tin reserves. Tin mining ceased in 1998, but the forces of ‘deglobalisation’ and the search for ethically and ecologically higher-standard inputs has made plans by firms such as Cornish Metals to restart operations newly viable. The CMS presents tin as a ‘growth mineral’, committing to work further to fill the so‑called ‘midstream’ of smelting and refining capacity so that more of the value chain can be captured within British borders, reducing reliance on the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and realising more of the potential worth of the product domestically.

This is just one of the ways in which the new CMS surpasses the previous focus on exploration alone by pledging to scale up domestic production, processing and stockpiling of minerals. For instance, lithium – present in high concentrations in Cornwall’s ‘clay country’ – now has an explicit domestic production target to be reached by 2035.

This aspiration is supported by the Clean Energy Industries Sector Plan, released alongside the Modern Industrial Strategy, which gave a starring role to critical minerals insofar as domestic production and processing of lithium and nickel is seen as crucial to reducing reliance on overseas supply for battery technologies. A long-promised Circular Economy Strategy looks likely to reinforce this by setting out how critical resources and raw materials are used and reused within the wider reindustrialisation of the UK’s economy, as well as reducing Britain’s reliance on importing raw materials.

Most relevant to the defence and security dimension are the strategically important reserves of tungsten centred on Cornwall and its border with Devon. Tungsten is a resource pivotal to advanced manufacturing and defence production, but whose supply mostly comes from the PRC and Russia. Like tin, it was mined historically, but its fortunes were tethered to the threat of war and conflict owing to its utility in arms production – for instance, as an alternative to depleted uranium in shells.

In the current climate, companies such as Cornwall Resources are set to see significant international interest as the struggle intensifies to stockpile tungsten, with the potential for the UK’s output to anchor trade agreements with trusted allies such as the United States (US). Clearsighted about Britain’s own need to stockpile such assets, the CMS’ expansive definition of ‘growth minerals’ puts on stream a more supportive financial and policy environment for tungsten producers in order to safeguard sovereign capability.

The minerals sector is strategically central to national interest, but also rendered unstable by the speculative dynamics which drive it from exploration to extraction. In light of this, the CMS tentatively positions HM Government to adopt a more activist and interventionist approach to securing supply akin to that seen in the nascent new state capitalisms of the post-Cold War era, from the US to the PRC.

Local companies, such as Cornish Metals and Cornish Lithium, have seen HM Government take a multi‑million pound stake in their operations via the National Wealth Fund. Such investments represent a cautious step towards the robust state action which increasingly defines the governance of sovereign supply of resources among allies and adversaries alike.

It remains to be seen whether the UK can support and even subsidise national champions of its own. The £50 million committed to state investment in the CMS is a start, but is relatively small next to existing National Wealth Fund investments. As such, there will be a need to select recipients carefully in pursuit of greater scale and concentration in order to avoid money being spread too thinly. However, by kickstarting a conversation about the role of the state in realising the opportunity to secure supply of critical minerals, the CMS undoubtedly represents the right direction of travel.

Frederick Harry Pitts is Associate Professor in Political Economy and the Future of Work, and Head of Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Exeter’s Cornwall Campus. He is Deputy Director of the Centre for the Public Understanding of Defence and Security and a Co-Investigator of the UKRI Critical Minerals Challenge Centre and ESRC Centre for Sociodigital Futures.

---

To stay up to date with Britain’s World, please subscribe or pledge your support!

What do you think about this Memorandum? Why not leave a comment below?