Revving up British industry

THE closure of Honda’s car plant at Swindon is a tragedy for the 3,500 people employed there as well as a massive blow to the thousands of workers involved in the supply chains.

It’s a tragedy on a human level because of the devastating impact that losing a job has on the psyche and because of the long-term harm that this has on families and communities.

Honda’s decision to take production back to Japan is also devastating on an national level because it may mark the beginning of the end of the remarkable renaissance of Britain’s car industry of the last few decades.

Manufacturers operate on long timeframes and on the lowest of margins so Honda will not have taken the decision lightly. This will have been years in the making, and given an extra push by the recent EU-Japanese economic partnership agreement ruling out tariffs on Japanese car exports to the EU.

But Honda, like its US and German competitors, is also going through its own industrial restructuring.

Car makers face a myriad of challenges. These include a collapse in the market for diesel vehicles because of pressures from the green lobby and lunatic government tax policies which have demonised diesel engines, leading to a glut of cheaper second-hand cars.

At the same time, Chinese manufacturers such as Didi Chuxing are racing ahead, pumping out new electric vehicles with the goal of supplying half the world’s cars sold over the next decade. Others are exploring hydrogen technologies. In short, car making is going through a revolution.

There are other trends leading to a downturn in use: the high cost of keeping cars in cities, the rise of Uber and other sharing arrangements, improved public transport and rising urbanisation, which means that many youngsters are not bothering to buy cars. In Japan, the number of people below 30 applying for driving licences is down a third. And Brexit? Where does it fit into the puzzle?

Honda’s bosses have gone to great pains to say that Brexit is not the trigger, pointing out that its Turkish plant is also for the chop. Yet it would be naive not to acknowledge that the uncertainty over what type of trade deal is to be negotiated between the UK and the EU was a factor.

What is sure is that the Government’s hopeless prevarication has created a situation of confusion.

What the Government can do, though, is pull out all stops to help the Swindon employees to find new work or to retrain if necessary to find jobs in related industries.

Helping them find jobs could be easier than it might seem. Buried in the latest Office for National Statistics (ONS) employment figures is the extraordinary fact that there are now 65,000 manufacturing vacancies in the UK, the most since 2004.

The figures also show that after decades of decline, the number of people employed in UK manufacturing is growing fast and now stands at 2.7m – that’s 100,000 more than in 2010. This is still a long way from the 6.7m employed in 1978 but the trend is on the right path.

That’s the good news, coming as it does with the ONS report yesterday which shows that overall employment is at the highest since records began in 1971, with 32.6m people in work. The bad news is that we still don’t have enough skilled people to fill these manufacturing vacancies despite vocal warnings from the EEF, the trade body, about the UK’s critical shortage of engineers and other skilled technical staff.

If the Government wants to show it is in control and does not need to rely on foreign investors for a healthy economy, it should invest greater resources into improving vocational training and encourage schools and industry to work more closely with local job centres.

Swindon is a good place to start.

Vegan victory

WHOEvEr is behind the Greggs Twitter feed deserves a big, fat pay rise.

The social media campaign around the launch of the Greggs vegan sausage was so sensational that sales shot up 14pc in a matter of weeks.

The result is that profits will be higher than forecast – and the company’s shares are on a high too.

The Greggs Twitter campaigners were smart because, rather than back down in the face of critics who described Greggs as ‘PC-ravaged clowns’ for going vegan, they were equally rude back.

There is a lesson here: don’t listen to trolls and don’t roll over.