Vision 2035: Critical Minerals Strategy

The strategy that replaced the withdrawn 2022 document, published 22 November 2025 under the UK's modern Industrial Strategy and last updated 23 January 2026. It sets a ten-year vision to 2035 and defines success by four features: at least 10% of annual UK industrial demand for critical minerals in aggregate met by domestic production (primary extraction, processing and refining) by 2035; within that, at least 50,000 tonnes of lithium or lithium carbonate equivalent produced domestically by 2035; 20% of total annual UK industrial demand met through recycling of products to recover critical minerals by 2035; and supply diversified so that no more than 60% of the UK's annual demand for any critical mineral is imported from any one country by 2035. It works by reference to the existing UK critical minerals list and adds a separate forward-looking "growth minerals" list tied to the Industrial Strategy's growth sectors. Minerals eligible for the support set out in the strategy include antimony, gallium, germanium, natural graphite, rare earth elements and tungsten. Following the 2025 Spending Review, the strategy states that funding of up to £50 million will be made available by the Department for Business and Trade to support critical mineral projects, which could include expanding research and innovation as well as supporting commercialisation, with further detail to be announced in 2026; the strategy calls this a new critical mineral fund. The £50 million is a funding envelope, not a project award or a contracted or disbursed amount.

The single-country import ceiling is the analytically distinctive element — a quantified diversification target of the same family as the EU CRMA's 65% benchmark, set at 60% and expressed without naming a supplier. Coded alongside the CRMA it lets the two European-side benchmarks be compared directly. The strategy's emphasis on midstream processing and recycling as the UK's stated competitive advantage puts it in the same category as the Australian production tax incentive: an allied instrument aimed at the separation and refining step rather than at extraction.