ASG Aerospace Welcomes £2.5bn Rolls-Royce Investment as Major Opportunity for British Manufacturing

The £2.5bn engine agreement is a win for Derby, and an even bigger opportunity for the firms that supply it.

The Chancellor used his first Budget to confirm a £2.5 billion programme with Rolls-Royce, shared between the company and the Government over ten years. It will develop a new generation of cleaner, more efficient engines for passenger and military aircraft. The bigger prize is a British engine on the next generation of single-aisle jets, the workhorses of short-haul travel.

The market is enormous. The Aerospace Technology Institute expects global civil aerospace to be worth £220 billion a year by 2050, with single-aisle aircraft the largest share. Only a handful of countries can build engines for them, and Britain intends to be one. The programme is expected to support 3,300 jobs by the end of 2029, with tens of thousands more to follow.

Much of that work will flow through the supply chain. An engine is an assembly of thousands of precision parts. Rolls-Royce spent more than £3 billion with UK suppliers last year. A programme measured in decades builds on that.

The Government expects most of the new jobs to be created outside London and the South East. That plays to Britain's strengths. The country's aerospace supply chain is rooted in the Midlands and the North, in places with generations of engineering skill behind them.

ASG Aerospace is part of that story. The group makes complex, high-integrity components for aerospace and defence customers from seven sites in the UK and Germany. Long programmes reward suppliers who invest ahead of demand, in machines, in quality and above all in people. This agreement gives the whole sector the confidence to do exactly that.

People are where the opportunity is greatest. The deal comes with a jobs and skills plan, opening careers from design and research to the factory floor. For young people across the regions, it means new routes into skilled, well-paid engineering work that will last for decades.

The agreement also builds on the £100 million Aerospace Supply Chain fund launched this summer with the British Business Bank, which gives ambitious suppliers backing to grow.

"This is exactly the kind of long-term commitment our industry has been asking for," said Simon Weston, CEO of ASG Aerospace. "It gives suppliers the confidence to invest and young people a reason to choose engineering. The parts for these engines will be made in factories across our regions, and that's something to be proud of."