British Industrial Competitiveness Scheme: consultation on scheme eligibility and approach
Applies to England, Scotland and Wales
Consultation description
The British Industrial Competitiveness Scheme (BICS) scheme aims to reduce electricity costs. This is for manufacturing frontier industries within the Industrial Strategy’s growth sectors – the Industrial Strategy 8 (IS-8), and manufacturing foundational industries which provide key inputs to the frontier industries, who meet a certain threshold of electricity intensity.
Eligible businesses are to be exempt from paying the indirect costs of the Renewables Obligation, Feed-in Tariffs and the Capacity Market.
This consultation seeks views on the scheme’s proposed approach and how businesses eligible for the scheme should be selected. We are seeking views from all stakeholders with an interest in the proposed scheme.
The list of manufacturing foundational industry codes in Table 3 of Annex A was updated at 3:30pm on 24 November 2025.
Documents
Updates to this page
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The list of manufacturing foundational industry codes in Table 3 of 'Annex A: Standard Industrial Classification (SIC) codes for manufacturing frontier and manufacturing foundational industries' updated.
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First published.
Update history
2026-07-08 12:00
‘Annex A: Standard Industrial Classification (SIC) and Harmonised System (HS) codes eligible for BICS’ attachment updated with 4 additional SIC codes and 9 HS codes. This is the final list of eligible activities which will be reflected in the implementing legislation, and the government does not intend to make any further changes to the SIC and HS code lists for 2027.
2026-04-16 09:00
‘Government response to British Industrial Competitiveness Scheme: consultation on scheme eligibility and approach’ and ‘Annex A: Standard Industrial Classification (SIC) and Harmonised System (HS) codes’ added to page.
2025-11-24 15:46
The list of manufacturing foundational industry codes in Table 3 of ‘Annex A: Standard Industrial Classification (SIC) codes for manufacturing frontier and manufacturing foundational industries’ updated.
2025-11-24 09:30
First published.