SMMT helps businesses open up a wealth of growth opportunities, and another came last week with our new Meet the Heavy Body Builder event, hosting one-to-one meetings between suppliers from bodybuilder sector and heavy vehicle manufacturers seeking to add a new trailer, semi-trailer or body to their base vehicle. This is a thriving British-built industry which, according to the latest figures, generated around £4.5 billion in revenue in 2023 – directly adding value of almost £1.3 billion to the UK economy. That’s an increase of 53.1% over the past decade.
The expansion has been driven by a surge in businesses involved in building vehicle bodywork, up by a third (34.4%) since 2014, with more than 1,000 companies now competing in the UK. These businesses help meet the needs of a wide range of other key economic sectors, beyond automotive manufacturing, from construction and agriculture to recycling, retail, medical and public services, and more.
Meet the Heavy Body Builder attendees also received SMMT insights on key topics relevant to them, including Type Approval, with the date for mandatory full GB or UKNI type approval for M and N category vehicles due in early 2026, to ensure they can be manufactured for sale in Great Britain. Changes from paper based to Electronic Certificate of Conformity, which VCA is tasked with developing, are due to come into force in the middle of next year.
This week, meanwhile, I attended the UK Bus Summit in Manchester, with the great and the good of the sector coming together to discuss the future of the bus journey to net zero. The bus industry is a leader of road transport decarbonisation in the UK, with a 45.3% rise in zero emission registrations in the first half of 2025 – representing one in five new buses joining the road. It is also key to ensuring affordable access to green mobility, which was a major theme of the summit – and you can read Transport News Brief’s review of the event in this week’s edition.
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