Manufacturing: Investment Growth Forecast

Lord Peston Excerpts

Tuesday 5th July 2011 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Wilcox]

The Government are well aware—certainly my boss, the Secretary of State, is well aware—that advanced manufacturing is what will take our country forward in the future. Investment in technology, investment in skills and investment in the very thing that my noble friend has just mentioned are what will take us forward.

[Lord Peston]

I do not know where the Minister gets her figures from, but the Office for National Statistics, in its latest published figures on business investment, tells us that business investment fell in the first quarter of this year; so I would like to know who she is quoting as superior to the Office for National Statistics. However, is not the main question about the level of manufacturing output? Is the Minister aware that virtually everybody who is looking at the forecasts, for both the British and the global economy, now expects us to start going through a period of a fall in the expansion of manufacturing output locally and globally? Is that not a matter that the Government ought to be taking rather seriously?

[Baroness Wilcox]

We are predicting growth—not very exciting, but we are. We must always remember that over the past 30 years manufacturing has declined as a share of the economy; as a sector it has grown and continues to grow.