The ease of business travel and internet communications can give product developers a false sense of security when it comes to selecting parts suppliers and development partners around the world. The thrill is immediate: a bright future beckons, made of cheaper parts and magical supply-chain savings. The disappointments are slower to arrive but months or years down the line, plenty of designers and specifiers will end up questioning the decision to go ‘offshore’.

There are many good cases for outsourcing production across oceans and continents but my observation is that the shine is coming off the idea. The Observer’s Simon Caulkin has given a simple critique this week in his regular management column.

At Pli, we find the commercial benefits of selecting and using local UK parts suppliers are shorter logistics routes (less fuel), shared assumptions about quality (fewer rejects) and direct control of costs (you can meet often and discuss production issues face to face). For batch production (let’s say, 50 or 100 products in a single run), UK manufacturers are as good as anywhere in the world. Comparatively higher labour costs are offset by investments in cutting-edge manufacturing technology and an ethic of quality and reliability.

But we still look to other countries for our raw materials: our bamboo from China and India, and our wheat straw board also from China. Life-cycle analysis of the wheat straw board indicates that there’s still a carbon-benefit from its production and transport, even including shipping across an ocean. That means there’s more CO2 locked in the plant fibres than there is released into the atmosphere by the energy that goes into their processing and transport. Imagine the benefit if the transport was from farm gate to factory to customer, all inside the UK. People are working on this, but we aren’t there yet.

Schumacher’s 1973 book, Small is Beautiful, continues to resonate with architects and designers. It’s title could be used to describe UK manufacturing, too.