To get a model produced in the UK, to the specification expected these days, we would be paying close to 6 or 7 times what we are paying at the moment. Possibly more.
I work for a company who produce (amongst many other things) cheap injection moulded toys for babies. All our tooling/moulding/assembly/packaging is done in China. When the reality of the pandemic took hold, we looked at getting the same toys tooled and moulded in the UK. For very basic 2/3 final-colour moulded toys we were looking at a minimum 3-fold increase in cost, so a £3 toy would then be selling for £9 minimum. That's before we added on costs for assembly and packaging, plus the cost of getting the packaging printed and assembled.
These extra costs came from, in the main, the factories who would do the tooling and manufacturing (and costs remained the same as pre-pandemic). Another factor in the uplift of costs was transportation from said factories to our distribution centre. More expensive for a 250 mile journey in the UK than a 13,000 mile journey from China.
If we were to bring manufacturing (back) in house, we would have to increase costs to cover factory space, machine costs for tooling/moulding (of multiple designs), purchase and transportation of raw materials (metals, plastics, solvents), source a packaging supplier and of course staffing costs. That £3 toy would be selling for £25 just to cover our costs.
This example above is for one of our toys which has 8 parts (if I can remember there are 6 moulds), 4 of those the same and is extremely basic, with no painting or printing. These sell by the hundreds of thousands so I would hate to see the costs of a relatively low-volume UK produced item of stock with the variations and standard of printing which we demand these days.
Of course I would love to see models made in the UK, however is its just not feasible now for larger/established manufacturers to bring production back from the far east.
