UK found to be ‘dangerously’ reliant on China for critical minerals needed for defence and AI — SkimNews
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- Business select committee called for an urgent centralised policy and a "critical minerals finance facility" to fund rare earth and other critical mineral mines with grants, equity and debt, and said it could not be confident the government would satisfy any of its 10 tests.
- Liam Byrne, the committee's chair, called critical minerals "the alpha of the new economy," arguing Britain cannot rearm, build AI or deliver net zero without securing them, and remains "dangerously" exposed 16 years after China first weaponised its rare earth chokehold.
- China dominates refining of seven categories of minerals, including refined lithium for electric vehicles and rare earths used in the fuselages and wings of military aircraft to withstand temperature extremes, with MPs identifying processing — not raw mining — as the bottleneck.
- Lithium demand was projected to rise 45-fold between now and 2030, while demand for rare earths in permanent magnets used in military jets rises 16-fold over the same period, as Britain seeks to rebuild its military capabilities.
- China can suddenly cut off rare earth supplies, as it did in 2025, and the committee said the EU, US and other countries face the same risk; separate legacy chip restrictions after a Dutch intervention in China-owned Nexperia left the European car industry "days away" from stoppages last October.
- Trump secured a one-year reprieve on global rare earth export restrictions from Xi Jinping in October last year, extended to January 2027 after Xi's recent Washington visit — leaving the UK at the mercy of US-China relations.
- UK government said it is delivering £400m to ramp up domestic production and recycling, with 2035 goals of 10% of demand met by domestic production, 20% through recycling and no more than 60% from any single country; MPs said parliament had no visibility of which projects were being backed.
Why it matters: Britain's own 2035 strategy caps any single country at 60% of critical minerals supply, so even government-backed plans leave the dominant dependency largely intact. With the Trump-Xi rare earth reprieve running only to January 2027, the committee's funding push arrives while UK exposure still hinges on Beijing and Washington.
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