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£50 billion and up to 150,000 additional jobs

£50 billion and up to 150,000 additional jobs

£50 billion and up to 150,000 additional jobs. What will it take for UK photonics to get there?UK photonics generated £18.5 billion in 2024, up 20% in two years, with government advisers saying a national roadmap and targeted investment could help the sector reach £50 billion and support up to 150,000 additional jobs by 2035.

The bigger number is easy to state. What's more interesting is what the actual ecosystem looks like on the ground, because I saw two very different pieces of it this week.

The first is prototyping. CORNERSTONE, an open-access silicon photonics rapid-prototyping foundry at the University of Southampton, gives UK researchers and companies access to domestic fabrication for early-stage R&D and proof-of-concept photonic chips. That capability is genuinely strong here.

The second is getting technology into the hands of the people who'll actually use it, and Photonic Solutions Ltd., one of several UK distributors doing this, put it well on the panel: their job isn't shipping a catalogue, it's getting involved early enough to help a spin-out or small manufacturer find real customers before they've built anything at scale.

That's the harder challenge, often called the "lab-to-fab" gap: strong research and prototyping, but scaling into commercial production, packaging and manufacturing still needs stronger domestic infrastructure and supply chains.

I also heard from John Lincoln, stepping down after years leading the Photonics Leadership Group, who put it plainly: the UK is genuinely excellent at this, and has quietly undersold itself for years. His successor, Dr. Lewis Hill, now inherits a sector with real momentum, but also a scale-up challenge that hasn't disappeared.

The roadmap hasn't landed yet. When it does, that gap, not the headline target, is the part worth checking first.

Sources: Photonics Leadership Group; CORNERSTONE Photonics Innovation Centre; Photonic Solutions; Council for Science and Technology, "Photonics: Capturing the Opportunities for Growth and Global Leadership" (Mar 2026).