Tuesday 30 June 2009

When it's gone, it's gone.

Yesterday was like most other week days; I got up, got ready, went to work, came home, did a little shopping and rounded the day off by providing the usual taxi service for my daughter, Lucy.

However, I live in Coventry and the events regarding the demise of even more of our motor manufacturing industry put a different light on these mundane activities.

After rising shortly after six o’clock I stood and looked out of the patio doors whilst the kettle boiled, looking over the fields to gauge the weather, I saw the sun briefly glinting of the rubble of the Jaguar Browns Lane factory a mile or so over the main A45 Birmingham Road, I knew that, whatever was going on there today, is did not involve the manufacture of motor cars. I recalled a story told to me by a colleague from their PR department regarding the occasional request from US Jaguar fans asking about the possibility of having a brick from the factory sent to them as a memento – they could have as many as they want now.

I left the house at around seven fifteen and took my usual route to work. The trip takes me past the Massey Ferguson factory in Banner Lane, A great example of 1930’s architecture with a huge monstrosity of a modern office block blotting the landscape. Not many people know that it started life as the Standard Motors factory, none of the younger generation will remember that this site used to supply the world with tractors and farm machinery. The ‘developers’ are in there now but the current economic crisis has forced even this activity to stop.

In the evening we popped out to Sainsbury’s to top up our provisions, the new store standing on the site of the Rover Canley factory, formerly Standard Triumph and from there we made our way into Coventry city centre past the Armstrong Siddeley and Rolls Royce factory, now a low cost hotel which has retained the old Armstrong Siddeley factory gates as an ornament.

Reminders of our motoring heritage are everywhere in this city. It is preserved in the Coventry Business School building which used to make Morris engines and in the street names which bear the names of the cars, cycles and motorcycles which used to be built here but, sadly, there is not much evidence of a live thriving industry any more.

It is true that we still produce a lot of cars in the UK but for how long? Frequent fluctuations in the global economy result in the need to adjust the numbers of cars built and the truth is that it is simply cheaper and easier and quicker to ‘reduce’ a British workforce than their counterparts anywhere else in Europe.

I was deeply affected by the plight of the Longbridge and more recently LDV workers. They are good, hard working people who are dedicated to building motor cars. They have not lost one minute to industrial action in the best part of twenty five years and have accepted every new working practice – and there have been a few, directed at them with good grace. True, productivity there was low but don’t confuse this with laziness, due to half a century of underinvestment, some of the production lines there were good examples of how cars were built a quarter of a century ago, indeed, until the old mini ended production recently, a visitor could engage in industrial archaeology and see how cars were built fifty years ago.

My own view is that Rover was sold off to BMW with suspicious haste at a time when the company was making profits in excess of £80 million. LDV has suffered the same indifference from our government. Subsequent events have proved that the German management had no idea of the relevance of this company to the British public and, more importantly, media and did not care at all about its importance to the British economy. The Russian owners of LDV have demonstrated that they also could care less about developing a strategic UK industry.

After the inevitable failure of BMW following some rather dubious statements regarding losses using their own eccentric accounting methods, the UK government should have behaved just like a French, German or Italian government would have and acted in the national interest to ensure that a major, strategic part of our industrial infrastructure remained viable. Instead ministers lined up to be seen as being concerned in front of the workers for the benefit of the media in the light of a looming election – just like now. After the election, with the exception of Richard Burden, Northfield’s hard working MP; they simply walked away apart from setting up some sort of task force which remained largely unheard from but has cost £14 million. With LDV, our own minister could not even take place in the negotiations because of a past incident with the Russian oligarch owner and a luxury yacht.

Just like my travels around Coventry demonstrated, when it’s gone, its gone and I am worried about just who is fighting for real jobs for all those skilled workers in our manufacturing industry.

Tuesday 16 June 2009

Green Shoots?

According to data from Warwick Business School, the rate of job losses announced by employers has fallen sharply, giving rise to hopes that the growth in unemployment may not be as high or as long-lasting as originally expected. Even the recent gloomy news from CIPD which speculates that over 300,000 jobs could go in the public sector does not necessarily contradict this as Thomas Prosser believes that significant numbers of these would be accounted for by natural wastage over the next 5 years.

Plan, What Plan?

Lord Mandelson has gone to great lengths today to explain why greater links between businesses and our higher education establishments can create opportunities and greater competitiveness for UK business and industry. The fact that our universities are already doing just this and have gained an international reputation for excellence, attracting interest from around the world is an indication of his inexperience and lack of knowledge in this area. What UK business needs is for government to develop a long term plan for the growth of our manufacturing sector, rather than its decline, and that would be helped by appointing someone with some experience of manufacturing industry – but such creatures are rare in parliament.

Monday 15 June 2009

Support for LDV

Just in case it drops out of the news: Over 800 people at LDV + up to 2000 in the supply chain have lost their jobs because this country is more inclined to support profligate bankers than our hard working and strategically important manufacturing industry. It is incredible that a Labour government can allow so many working people to be thrown out of work, adding to benefits costs whilst losing tax income. There are also the social and personal costs of unemployment to the families of those affected. There are too few politicians who have any experience of, or concern for the UK manufacturing sector. Is this because it doesn’t pay high enough wages?

Friday 5 June 2009

Politics before People

Managers and workers at Birmingham van maker LDV have been forced to cancel a lobby of parliament because of the cabinet reshuffle. They were told there would be no ministers to meet them because of events at Westminster. A classic example of politicians putting politics before people.

Not Angry Enough - Perhaps.

I know that I can rightly be accused of being an angry old man but I just can't help seeing the faces behind the numbers. The jobs at threat at LDV and Vauxhall with the allied services and supply chain must amount to over 20,000. Every single one represents a man or woman with a family, mortgage, responsibilities and aspirations. It is impossible to describe the gut wrenching feeling that the workers and their families are going through right now. They have done nothing wrong and they feel powerless to act.

If they end up on the dole – and it looks like most of them will, the exchequer looses their tax income and then has to pay out in benefits. That is only a small part of the equation; people loose the dignity of work, families are broken up, Britain looses more skills and another significant part of what is left of our manufacturing industry – and those whose role it was to plan for the future of this country and its people loose even more credibility.

This country needs to put a line in the ground right now and begin to defend our manufacturing sector. To have a properly operating mixed economy without a viable or even thriving manufacturing sector is simply politically illiterate.

Manufacturing may not be fashionable but it is valuable and necessary for the livelihoods of millions of people in the UK. The problem seems to be that very few of our politicians have any knowledge or understanding of this strategically vital sector.

Thursday 4 June 2009

Ghost Town

Do we really have to watch the spectacle of the LDV plant being dismantled and shipped to the Far East, just like so many others. In Coventry there are the ghosts of Alfred Herbert, Churchill, Massey Ferguson, Standard, Triumph, Armstrong Siddeley, Jaguar, Rover and many other icons which made the products from this country respected around the world and provided training and skilled work for tens of thousands of men and women in this city

Wednesday 3 June 2009

Mandy's Mishaps Costing UK Jobs

So, Lord Mandelson can not take part in negotiations to save the jobs of thousands of Vauxhall workers because of his past relationship with Oleg Deripaska, the Russian oligarch owner of Gaz…….. Well! Just what are we supposed to do if the UKs Business Secretary is in such a position? As the same company - Gaz - is also responsible for the demise of LDV, it is not surprising that these negotiations are heading towards disaster for the workforce there too and another slice of UK manufacturing industry goes down the pan. Does this man have no shame?

From Thatcher to Mandelson UK industry used as a political football

The mention of Margaret Thatcher brings a wide range of responses in Britain today, from hate to admiration but I guess that many of those who express even the most negative views will agree that UK industry simply had to change. British industry was undoubtedly inefficient compared with the rising post war stars of Japan and Germany and with the major part of UK industry still operating out of dirty, century old and in many cases war ravaged facilities it is not therefore surprising that major sectors of the UK manufacturing industry found it difficult to compete by the 1970’s.

British Leyland under its many guises, which finally ended as Rover Group five years after BMW sold it for just £10 to the Phoenix consortium, was supported by successive governments with piecemeal grants and subsidies which although substantial in total were never enough to revive the huge motor company which at one time employed over 100,000 people. This drip feed kept the patient alive but was never enough to enable it to compete with new, purpose built facilities that were taking larger slices of the UK and world car market and were certainly never enough to keep new model development (around £500 million per car) ahead of the curve. Many will also be surprised to discover that the government aid provided to Rover was far less than the French and Italian governments used to support their motor industries.

The image of Britain’s brave new world in the seventies and since has been that of service industries, banking and finance, tourism, communications and high value specialist research and development but I have always been sceptical about how such an economy could absorb the millions of semi skilled and unskilled people who once worked in the motor, steel, shipbuilding, mining and other industries - the fact is that for the most part it didn’t. Many of those who were thrown out of work when steel mills, coal mines and car factories closed down never worked again.

But what about the investment in training and other initiatives that successive governments have made? It was mostly wasted according to a massive, 30 year study of new business start ups carried out by Professor David Storey of the Warwick Business School Centre for Small and Medium Enterprises. This study has compared new business start ups in the industrial North East of England with the entrepreneurial South East and it has shown that the gap has remained as constant as in railway lines.

Mrs Thatcher and her successors may have been correct in following the philosophy that ‘you can’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs’ but having broken the eggs by dismantling most of the UK’s manufacturing and heavy engineering industry, they seem to have forgotten the recipe for omelets. Napoleon said the UK is ‘a nation of shopkeepers’ although Adam Smith first used the phrase in 1776. We can’t just be a nation of shopkeepers, neither can we be a nation of bankers, computer specialists or tourist guides. A country with a population and economy as large as the UK needs a robust mixed economy which must include a viable, competitive manufacturing sector which is significantly owned or controlled in the UK. This is of major strategic importance and a failure to recognise this has implications for many other sectors including education. Without a sound manufacturing sector, there is nothing to attract young people to train as engineers and if we are no longer seen as having a tradition of engineering excellence, why would students come to this country to learn?


I am afraid that I take no encouragement from Peter Mandelson’s recent package of measures; it is simply another transfusion which will keep the patient alive on the operating table without putting him in a position to get up and fight again. It looks like a long drawn out death for what is left of our once mighty manufacturing and engineering industry and it makes me sad. This is partly because I come from Coventry and the motor industry is in my blood; this city used to boast 86 motor car makers, 75 motor cycle manufacturers, 35 body makers and 25 engine makers, no other city in the world has had such an influence on the automotive revolution – and all we have left now is one taxi maker.

It is not just the fact that I come from a motor industry background that I feel so strongly. Ministers, pundits and even professors have given their opinion, created policy and studied the industry for years but I have witnessed the reality of government policies in real terms and the effects they have had on real people. Having spent many years in the motor industry at manufacturing plants in Longbridge, Cowley, Solihull, Canley, Ryton and others, I have seen at first hand and face to face what it means when large workforces are told that they are no longer wanted. These are people who had the right to expect that their government had the knowledge and experience to plan for the future and have been let down. The numbers of redundancies being reeled out on the news every day are not just statistics; every one relates to a real man or woman who has lost their income, every one is a devastated family.

Thatcher’s big plan has failed because it did not recognise that we need a truly mixed economy and that manufacturing has a significant role to play in that. Successive governments have been happy to be party to the demise of large scale manufacturing in the UK partly, I believe, because they have been too concerned about the power of organised labour and partly because the interests of lawyers and bankers are well represented in our legislature but entrepreneurs and engineers are very thin on the ground in the House of Commons.

The Longbridge Sacrifice

£14 million has been wasted so far on a sham of an inquiry at Longbridge so I think that it is about time someone spoke up for the workforce, including the management. The image of a strike ridden, bolshie workforce from the seventies was the one which remained in peoples’ minds but during the last fifteen to twenty years before its closure, this image could not have been further from the truth.

There was not one minute lost to industrial dispute at Longbridge in twenty years. The workforce had accepted some of the most flexible working practices in Europe and all categories of worker, from the track to senior management worked together in a spirit of cooperation that went little reported. Indeed the flexible working practices at Longbridge were in advance of those at the BMW plant in Munich.

The UK Government knew that Longbridge was not a basket case as far as the quality and dedication of its workers were concerned as I personally arranged visits to the site by Peter Mandelson, Stephen Byers and many others. Although I am sure that they were more interested in the photo op than really wanting to help. The local MP Richard Burden was one of the only politicians who genuinely tried to help.

I have heard too many comments regarding the ‘Billions of taxpayers pounds pumped into Longbridge’ and it makes me sick every time. Major, planned investment was never put into our motor industry. If you give a starving man enough to keep him alive he will never win any races. The French motor industry received real investment – and they still have one, as with Germany and Italy.

I know that the real story of Longbridge will be told but until then and quite simply, Longbridge was not making the losses reported by BMW and under UK accounting rules would have been in profit. The plant had a capacity of 300,000 vehicles a year and the truth is that there was and still is an overcapacity for vehicle manufacture in Europe and whilst other countries fought to save their industry, the UK failed to fight for ours, blaming EC rules for not allowing them to offer financial support - those same rules that were ignored by all other EC countries and were most recently and conveniently forgotten when the banks needed billions of government aid.

Coventry Council Con

The government has announced that at least half a million new houses need to built over the next twenty years to meet the demand for new homes and that around 40,000 of these will be in the Coventry area. I do not doubt that these houses are needed and I would not be surprised if that figure is a conservative one.

Of course, nobody will want a large new housing estate built in their back yard, but other than building in the North Sea, just about everywhere else is in someone’s back yard. So conceding the inevitability that there is going to be a number of large new housing projects in this area. As we are supposedly in a period of consultation I have tried to discover just how much extra infrastructure will also be built to accompany these projects. By infrastructure, I mean –

Roads
Schools
Nurseries
Doctor’s surgeries
Dental practices
Facilities for children & teenagers
Facilities for the elderly
Shops
Sports and leisure
Transport
Jobs

Nobody at the City Council has been able to tell me which, if any of the above will also be built to support these large projects. So, in order to get some idea of what we may expect I have found out what extra infrastructure has been provided to accompany the 500+ house estate which is now nearing completion at the site of the Massey Fergusson factory in Banner Lane and it is not a very encouraging prospect.

Roads – None other than those on the site, but they have agreed to put traffic calming measures in Broad Lane. (I thought that I was being sarcastic when I said that they would probably build the speed humps first!)
Schools - The Developer, not the council, has to make one off donations totalling £250,000 to schools or educational projects within a two mile radius of the site. There could possibly be 250 extra children in the area resulting in the Banner Brook estate so this figure is poultry.
Nurseries - None
Doctor’s surgeries - None
Dental practices - None
Facilities for children & teenagers - None
Facilities for the elderly - None
Shops – Small 1400 sq metre in total.
Sports and leisure – None above that which was already there.
Transport – Two extra bus pull-ins
Jobs – The developer must market the tower to let for offices etc.
So judging by this the answer to the question regarding what extra infrastructure will accompany future large housing projects, the answer seems to be, ‘very little’.

One would have though that local authorities would have learned some lessons about the need to support such schemes with quality infrastructure, but it seems that Coventry City Council are either out of touch with the needs of Coventry people or to arrogant and dictatorial to care what we want.

Accept Responsibility Brown

I am sorry Mr Brown but you do not have any authority unless you also accept the responsibility that must go with it. Every time you make a speech or public comment you carefully take every opportunity to take us through the story that this is a global problem which needs a global solution. OK we get the message that it is not the fault of the UK and was therefore, out of your control.

But you seem to have overlooked a couple of points which we, the electorate certainly have not. Firstly throughout your time as Chancellor you praised the fact that the UK is at the hub and a significant player in the global financial system. Surely then, the UK is at the hub and has significant responsibility for the current crisis. Secondly, if this was the case, the UK government must take responsibility for the outcome of years of excesses by financial institutions and ineptitude by regulators over which you did have some control.

The British public should expect their elected government to act with due diligence and to manage the affairs of this country in the best interests of the majority. We all know how much you wanted the Prime Ministers job but with that position of authority comes a great deal of responsibility for the actions or inactions of the government. You accepted the job; please have the decency to accept the responsibility which goes with it.

Tuesday 2 June 2009

UK Manufacturing News

So, the UK should forget about manufacturing because we simply can not compete with China, India, etc. Has anyone thought to tell Germany, France, Italy, Spain ......

Midlands Manufacturing

Nick Clegg (Lib) says we should start buying cars to help West Midlands industry. 86% of cars sold in the UK last year were imported so who's economy will be helped by such actions?

Mandelson Costs Jobs

20,000 jobs are about to be dumped at LDV and Vauxhall. Is Lord Mandelson capable of getting of his smug bum to do anything .... other than lunch?

Manufacturing News

Weststar, the latest in a long line to let down the LDV workforce. We are about to loose another strategically important part of our economy because our government is incapable of understanding the importance of a viable manufacturing sector and is indifferent to the need for real jobs for skilled people. Shame on our government for allowing our economy to be held to ransom by here today gone tomorrow multinationals.