The University of Warwick has been awarded millions of pounds to boost British production of crucial materials for electric car batteries.

The £12 million in funding has been awarded by the Faraday Battery Challenge to the high value manufacturing catapult at Warwick Manufacturing Group (WMG) and CPI at NETPark (North East Technology Park), in County Durham.

It will be used to create the new Advanced Materials Battery Industrialisation Centre (AMBIC).

The centre will bridge the gap between academic research and battery production and will focus on how batteries can be made to work more efficiently, as well as on equipment and skills development.

The university says the centre is needed to help the UK develop the electric vehicle batteries of the future, with reduced costs, more sustainable materials and improved performance.

Electric vehicle batteries make up around half the cost of a new electric vehicle, so reducing the cost of their production is crucial to lowering the cost of EVs to parity with combustion engine vehicles.

The funds are part of a wider investment strategy by the Faraday Battery Challenge and the High Value Manufacturing Catapult to ramp up Britain's battery production and infrastructure to boost the UK's domestic battery supply chain.

Professor David Greenwood, CEO of the WMG high value manufacturing catapult, said: "Cathode and anode active materials make up more than 50% of the value of an automotive battery cell.

"For the UK to take its great academic research into production, and to capture the billions of pounds of resulting economic value in the UK, we need facilities which allow Britain to scale up and fully evaluate new materials. This investment, alongside the combined skillsets of CPI and WMG will provide that capability for the UK."

"The funds are specifically to help turbocharge the scale up of battery materials manufacturing within the UK.

"Only by producing batteries on a wider scale domestically can the EV industry make sure there is no bottleneck in supply and demand. By strengthening UK supply chains of battery materials, WMG is working with UKBIC and others to create a more resilient supply chain."