Resilience for the Future: The United Kingdom's Critical Minerals Strategy

The UK's first critical-minerals strategy, published 22 July 2022 and last updated 13 March 2023. It sets out an "A-C-E" approach — accelerate the UK's domestic capabilities, collaborate with international partners, and enhance international markets. Alongside it the British Geological Survey carried out its first UK criticality assessment, defining by economic vulnerability and supply risk a cohort of 18 minerals with high criticality for the UK: antimony, bismuth, cobalt, gallium, graphite, indium, lithium, magnesium, niobium, palladium, platinum, rare earth elements, silicon, tantalum, tellurium, tin, tungsten and vanadium. The strategy records that for each of the 18, the top three producer countries control between 73 and 98 percent of global production, and that China is the biggest producer of 12 of the 18. The publication was withdrawn on 24 November 2025; every page of the document carries the stamp "Withdrawn 22 November 2025".

The UK's entry point into this database and a useful contrast case: the criticality cohort is built from an explicit BGS assessment of economic vulnerability and supply risk, and the strategy states production concentration — including China's position on 12 of the 18 minerals — as a finding of that assessment rather than as a political characterisation. Germanium is absent from the 2022 cohort but present in the 2025 successor, which is the kind of movement a designation lineage is worth coding to capture.