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.

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

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.