MPs Sound Alarm Over U.K.’s Reliance on China for Critical Minerals

A probe from the United Kingdom’s Parliament warns that the country is dangerously reliant on China for critical minerals used for the military, renewable energy infrastructure and artificial intelligence.

Parliament’s investigation identified significant bottlenecks in the processing stage for seven categories of minerals, including refined lithium needed for electric vehicles, and rare earths used in fuselages and wings of military aircraft. Between now and 2030, demand for lithium in the U.K. is expected to increase 45-fold, while demand for rare earths used in military jets could rise by 16-fold. 

China controls roughly a quarter of the world’s lithium mining capacity, and accounts for more than two-thirds of the world’s cobalt and lithium processing capacity. 

“The U.K. is now dangerously dependent on supply chains that are dominated by China – and China’s newfound appetite for export controls has lit up how quickly this dependency has become a dangerous vulnerability,” the report reads, pointing to rare earth export restrictions China enacted in 2025. 

The report estimates that building safe and secure alternative supplies of critical minerals will take 10-15 years to fully realize, and would require sustained commitment from successful regimes, as well as strong long-term partnerships with industry stakeholders and G7 nations. However, the probe uncovered what it described as a fundamental barrier to achieving that goal, pointing to how the government’s progress has been “at best, opaque.” 

“Parliament has no visibility of the capabilities the Government is seeking to protect, the vulnerabilities it has identified, or the projects it is backing to reduce risk,” the report says. “As a result, we cannot provide Parliament with any confidence that a sufficiently robust plan is in place, or that progress is being made at the pace that the UK’s economic security requires.”

Moving forward, Parliament is calling for a more coordinated institutional approach to securing the U.K.’s critical mineral supply chains. That would include the creation of a Critical Minerals Finance Facility, which would bring together the country’s financial institutions to issue grants, equity, debt and guarantees needed to accelerate necessary projects.