The rate gap is real, so let's not pretend otherwise
Reshoring articles like to imply overseas sourcing never made sense. It did, and for some work it still does. Get It Made cites £10 to £21 per hour for CNC machining in China against roughly £30 in the UK, and UK ISO 9001 shops run £50 to £65 for 3-axis milling on Parallel Precision's benchmarking. A factor of two to five on the machine rate is why so much volume work went east, and platforms such as RapidDirect and Haizol exist to route it there.
The mistake is not using the China route. The mistake is comparing its unit price against a UK quote as if they were the same product. They are not. One is a part price. The other is closer to a landed, verified, replaceable part price. To compare honestly you have to build the China number up to the same definition.
The eight lines of landed cost
| Cost line | China route | UK route |
|---|---|---|
| 1. Unit price | Low, the headline advantage | Higher, includes UK overheads |
| 2. Freight and insurance | Sea freight in weeks, air freight at a premium | A pallet on a van |
| 3. Duty and import VAT handling | Per commodity code, plus broker and admin | None |
| 4. MOQ excess stock | Minimum orders can turn 50 parts into 500 on your shelf | Quote from one, batch when it pays |
| 5. Goods-inward inspection | Mandatory, recourse is hard once accepted | Reduced where the supplier inspects before dispatch |
| 6. Reject cycle | Weeks, time zones, and a shipment in dispute | Days, a phone call and a van |
| 7. Engineering and communication time | Real hours across language and time zones, per revision | Direct conversation with the engineer |
| 8. Currency movement | USD or RMB exposure between order and payment | Sterling, none |
Lines 2 to 8 scale with distance, low volume and change frequency. That is the whole pattern: high, stable volume dilutes them until the rate gap survives; low, changing volume concentrates them until it does not.
The reject cycle is usually the decider
Machining fails sometimes, in every country. The question is what a failure costs you.
In the UK: a phone call, a van, and a replacement inside days, from a supplier you can put on a supplier scorecard. From overseas: photograph the defect, argue the interpretation of the drawing across a time zone, negotiate a credit or a remake, then wait for the next sailing, all while your line or your customer waits. If the parts were accepted at goods-inward before the fault surfaced, your leverage is mostly gone.
This is why tolerance and consequence, not geography, should drive the decision. A forgiving bracket that bolts on regardless can absorb a reject cycle. A ±0.025 mm bore that mates with hardware cannot. Price the failure case at the same time as the part, the way our cost guide prices the part.
Where each route genuinely wins
China wins when the design is stable and proven, the volume is high enough to fill minimum orders and amortise freight, tolerances are forgiving, and the planning horizon comfortably covers weeks on the water. Commodity parts at sustained volume. Run it properly: first article inspection before volume release, a defined goods-inward regime, and a second source somewhere for the day the route hiccups.
The UK wins on low volumes and one-offs, tight tolerances, urgency, and anything revised often, because every revision restarts the distance costs. It wins outright on regulated work: EN 10204 3.1 certificates and auditable traceability for rail, energy infrastructure and oil and gas are far easier to verify one van ride away. And it wins on IP-sensitive parts, where an NDA you can enforce within your own jurisdiction is worth real money.
Most buyers' honest answer is a portfolio: commodity volume east, critical and low-volume work here. The buyers who get burned are the ones who moved the critical work east because the commodity work went well.
The 2026 trade layer most comparisons miss
Duty is not a static line on the calculation any more. Since 1 July 2026 the UK's steel safeguard has been replaced by the tougher steel trade measure: tariff-free import volumes cut by 51 percent across the 20 steel product categories, and a 50 percent tariff on anything above the remaining quota, up from 25 percent.
Two things follow for machined-part buyers. First, the measure covers steel products, mainly raw and semi-finished material, so a typical finished machined component imports under its own commodity code and duty rate instead. Check the code per part rather than assuming. Second, the effect still reaches you indirectly, because the measure shapes what UK manufacturers pay for raw material, and material is one of the five inputs in every machining price.
We watch this space closer than most: TrueNorth publishes free live trackers for the UK, EU and Canadian steel quota regimes, updated daily. If your supply chain touches steel in any of the three, the remaining balances are worth a bookmark.
Where TrueNorth stands on the question
We are UK-first by design: a vetted, ISO-certified network of UK shops, dimensional inspection before dispatch, EN 10204 3.1 traceability as standard, and non-conforming parts replaced at our cost. For the work described above as UK-winning territory, that is the model built for it.
On one point we are openly ideological: we do not place work in China. The reason sits in the list above. An NDA or a supply agreement you cannot realistically enforce is not a foundation we will put under your parts, and enforcing either at that distance is exactly as hard as it sounds. For higher volumes where the maths genuinely favours overseas production, we maintain vetted overseas capacity elsewhere and run it under the same regime: our inspection, our traceability pack, our defect liability, one contract with us either way. The eight cost lines above become our problem to manage rather than yours to discover, and the answer we give you is the landed comparison, not the flattering unit price.
Send the drawing and the honest annual usage, and the DFM review comes back within 48 hours with a straight recommendation, including "this one belongs offshore" when that is the truth.