Government schemes tend to get covered from one angle: what it says on gov.uk. It’s worth also looking at how the businesses this is aimed at are actually reacting, because that tells you something the guidance document doesn’t.

Make UK, which represents manufacturers across the country, put out a response once the government confirmed the final eligible SIC and HS codes, and it’s a useful read precisely because it isn’t a simple thumbs up. They welcomed the confirmation — after a long consultation period, having a settled list is genuinely useful for businesses trying to plan. But the tone of their response was, in their own words, one of continuing to campaign, specifically for the scheme to be extended to cover the full 130,000 manufacturers in the UK rather than the roughly 10,000 currently eligible. Their point is straightforward: a scheme that helps a meaningful slice of manufacturing while leaving the rest exposed to the same electricity costs creates winners and losers within a sector that’s already under pressure, and that’s before you get into whether the eligible code lists themselves are drawn in the right place.

They also flagged something practical rather than political — that SIC and HS code eligibility issues are a live concern among their members, which lines up with what we hear directly: businesses that assumed they’d qualify because of what they make, only to find their registered SIC code doesn’t match what the scheme actually requires, or that a product sits just outside an eligible HS code rather than inside one. Make UK’s response to that has been to collect member feedback on exactly these code problems ahead of meetings with government, and to offer direct support helping members through their applications.

None of this changes the substance of the scheme — the codes are described as final for this year, and the mechanics of eligibility aren’t up for debate before applications open. But it’s a useful reminder that “finalised” doesn’t mean “uncontroversial,” and that the businesses closest to this are treating code-level accuracy, not the scheme’s existence, as the thing worth getting right. That’s consistent with our own advice: don’t spend time debating whether the scheme should cover more businesses — spend it making sure your own application, within the scheme as it exists, is accurate.