Britain’s Industrial Future

Drew Hendry Excerpts

Tuesday 15th November 2022 Commons Chamber

[Alan Brown (Kilmarnock and Loudoun) (SNP)]

Interestingly, the Minister kept using the phrase “industrial strategy” without acknowledging that the previous BEIS Secretary actually ripped up and abandoned the UK Government’s industrial strategy. So there is not an industrial strategy; there is just a series of ad hoc announcements of money and targets that are arbitrary. We do not have a coherent strategy that links it all together.

I should start by welcoming today’s news of the confirmation of the £4.2 billion order for the five Type 26 frigates awarded to BAE Systems at Govan and Scotstoun. Those ships will now be built in the dry because BAE has been able to commit to the £200 million factory that was previously promised by the UK Government some way back. It is not the number of frigates that was originally promised, but there is no doubt that the announcement today is good news for the workers in Glasgow.

That good news is in contrast to a couple of stories and events from yesterday. In the Chamber, the former Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, the right hon. Member for Camborne and Redruth (George Eustice), let slip what many of us had been saying for long enough, which is that the Australia and New Zealand trade deals that the Government signed are utter rubbish. Also yesterday, Bloomberg ran a story confirming that Paris’s stock market has now exceeded London’s stock market in value. These matters are interlinked. It is a combination of Tory free market ideology and Brexit, of course, and we continually see proof of the harm of Brexit in the UK’s performance compared with G7 and G20 countries.

There was a big lack of talk of Brexit in the contribution of the shadow Minister, the hon. Member for Sefton Central (Bill Esterson). Despite what we know of the harms of Brexit, Labour now says it wants to make Brexit work. Free movement of people has gone, the Labour leader tells us. We have recruited too many people from overseas into the NHS, he tells us. But the reality is that, when Labour has such a lead in the polls, it should be offering bolder plans, such as rejoining the single market, and certainly allowing free movement of people so we can grow the economy again. Right now the Labour position seems to be, “We won’t be quite as bad as the Tories”. That is hardly ambitious.

We have to be realistic: if we want to increase skilled jobs and the workforce, while continuing to recruit for the service sector, the hospitality industry, the NHS and so on, we need inward migration. There may be a legitimate debate about the fact that too many people have exited the workforce for various reasons, but the reality is that we currently have record low numbers of people seeking work compared with vacancies, so clearly immigration is required, and free movement of people with the EU is the logical step to achieve that.

[Drew Hendry (Inverness, Nairn, Badenoch and Strathspey) (SNP)]

My hon. Friend is making a powerful point. Of course, we need people to staff industries—in my constituency, hospitality is crying out for people and the health industry is crying out for people—and we used to be able to count on EU citizens, but there are not the people there to replace them. It is vital for a country such as Scotland to have a different approach from the one taken by this Government and this place over immigration. Our historical problem has been that we have suffered from emigration, rather than immigration, and we need people in Scotland.

[Alan Brown]

Absolutely. It is all about keeping that balance of population, growing the workforce, growing the skills base, helping our businesses grow and growing the tax base as well, which creates a fairer economy for all.

For too long in the UK, deindustrialisation was deemed acceptable as long as the financial City was booming in London, but that has been the wrong strategy for decades now. It has left coalfield areas such as my constituency struggling, not to mention the loss of industry and manufacturing in the main town of Kilmarnock and the Irvine valley. That has been replicated in industrial areas up and down the UK. The Tories have arguably now recognised this with the so-called levelling-up agenda, but that is a slogan that admits all those years of failure in terms of deindustrialisation. In reality, it was just a political strategy aimed at the red wall seats. The levelling-up agenda is so ad hoc that nobody can define what it means in terms of outputs and measures, and it opens the way for more political chicanery.

It is clear that Brexit has produced challenges for the automotive industry: additional paperwork; and rules of origin which will become more challenging for the industry as times goes on. According to the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders, despite recent increases in sales, 2022 is on course to be the weakest for car sales since 1982—a 40-year low in sales as we move into recession in the UK and have inflation at a 40-year high. On car manufacturing, while we know there have been global supply chain issues and long lead-in times for parts, the reality is that there has been a drop in output in the UK compared with the rest of Europe. Only Germany has suffered a bigger percentage decrease in manufacturing output.

On wider industrial strategies in car manufacturing and EVs, we must address the electric vehicle charging roll-out. The Government have a target of 300,000 charge points installed by 2030. That means that, each year from next year onwards, 31,000 charge points need to be installed; that is because only 34,000 have been installed to date. When we consider that the cumulative total installed at present needs to be installed nearly every year for seven years to hit the target, we realise the Government do not have a coherent strategy to achieve that.

I welcome that the battery car sales market share has increased and plug-in vehicles now account for over 21% of new sales, but we need to make sure the lack of infrastructure does not stall sales and output of such vehicles. In small, independent Norway, last year, EVs accounted for 65% of market share.