The role of engineers

SIR – “What better way to start the Year of Engineering”, said the Conservative MP Simon Hoare at this week’s Prime Minister’s Questions, “than by seeing manufacturing output at its highest level for a decade?”

This augurs well for what the Government describes as “a national campaign to increase awareness and understanding of what engineers do among young people aged 7-16, their parents and their teachers”, in order to close the widely reported skills gap.

For its part, the media should recognise and correctly attribute the work of engineers. They are not just the people who “fix things”, but the professional engineers who create, design and bring to market just about everything in our world. As Prince Philip once put it: “Everything that wasn’t invented by God was invented by an engineer.”

On a recent episode of the BBC series Inside the Factory, the words “engineer” or “engineering” were not used at all, despite Gregg Wallace, the presenter, salivating with childish enthusiasm over the scale, complexity and ingenuity of the machinery that professional engineers bring to our manufacturing industries. I have watched most of these programmes, and have been depressed to find that engineering seldom gets a mention.

Professor Kel Fidler

Terrington, North Yorkshire