EXCLUSIVE
ONE of Britain’s richest men is urging the Government to look beyond the coronavirus crisis and take steps now to create a much brighter future for the nation.
Self-made billionaire industrialist Sir Jim Ratcliffe is concerned that Boris Johnson “needs to be thinking quickly” and reappraise some key policies before it’s too late.
Sir Jim, 67, who founded chemicals giant Ineos and has a £21billion fortune, also shares the frustration of productive people stuck at home and believes our industrial shutdown may have gone too far.
He says: “There’s a bunch of people out there not earning any money.we need to get the economy warming up but in a safe manner.”
Can the cure sometimes be worse than the disease? “We need to be careful of that. People should be safe and self-isolating but they shouldn’t stop working.”
To help the UK fight coronavirus, Sir Jim has converted a factory at Newton Aycliffe, in County Durham, so it can make one million bottles of hand sanitiser a month – many of them given free to the NHS. Ninety per cent of sanitiser is made with either ethanol or isopropyl alcohol.
“We are the largest producer in Europe of both those products,” says Sir Jim.
“That’s why we’re ideally placed to produce sanitisers.”
He first thought about helping the UK this way just two weeks ago and now a factory in the UK and one in Germany are up and running. The products are highly flammable, he says, so there’s “more to it than you would imagine – you need non-explosive lighting – it’s not just a case of putting a bottling machine in”.
Ineos also produces raw chemicals that go into antibiotics, paracetamol, anti-inflammatories, anti-virals, aspirin and the reagent chemicals that go into testing kits.
His investment in basic hygiene is paying off globally. With 200 factories around the world, Sir Jim has only had to close three in India.
“Even the ones in Italy are still operating,” he says, “because I’ve told everyone that our products are essential to making drugs and hospital equipment – but they have to do it in a safe manner.”
Every worker has to stand two metres apart, hand sanitisers are everywhere, door handles cleaned twice a day, temperatures taken regularly. “I don’t want anyone coming in by mass transportation. When a lorry driver comes to our site he has to stay in his cab.”
It might be tough but it is paying off. “We’ve got 25,000 people in Ineos but only a handful with the virus. This is a question for the UK. Do we really want all our construction sites closed down, or continuing but behaving sensibly?”
He was quick to get many of his employees working from home and believes this could be the future for a more efficient Britain. “They’re not wasting hours every day commuting, travelling, getting tired. People fill in time-sheets every day so we know what they’re doing.
“We’ve gone from 500 people logging in from home on a daily basis to 6,000 people. That happened in 10 days.”
Sir Jim hopes the Government is learning from this crisis too. He bemoans the fact manufacturing “has collapsed in the past 20 years”. It was once 25 per cent of GDP, now it’s nine.
He says: “The UK, particularly as we’re coming out of the EU, should be more self-sufficient.
“Politicians abandoned manufacturing so we could become a service economy based on financial services in London.
“But if you want a strong, stable economy, you need a decent manufacturing sector, otherwise you end up with a fragile economy, buying everything from abroad.”
He is critical, too, of politicians pushing too fast for a zero-carbon