A manufacturing led recovery?

I spent yesterday visiting Converteam, who are a large employer in Rugby. Converteam are a world leader in power-conversion engineering manufacturing electric motors and generators used in a variety of applications. They have particular expertise in wind generation and are well positioned to take advantage of the move to "green" power. As a company making things and supplying world markets,they are the kind of business that the country will be looking towards to lead us out of recession as. It was a concern, therefore, to learn from Nik Pocrnic my host and who is the company's Director of Sourcing that currently a large proportion of their component supply and sub contract work is sourced from abroad. It appears that many UK firms don't currently have sufficient capacity to supply and this is at a time of recession. It begs the question that if we don't have the capacity now, how realistic are our hopes for a manufacturing led recovery once the world market recovers? Given the reliative weaknesses of financial services and the housing markets, this is the sector we will be relying on! It isn't too late for Government to address this issue and our loan gurantee scheme supporting loans to business is a start. Given the current weakness of manufacturing, it will be a tragedy if manufacturing businesses continue to fail and shed staff meaning that we will be in no shape to profit from the upturn when it eventually comes.