Economy: Manufacturing

Lord Lyell Excerpts

Thursday 3rd July 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lyell (Con)]

My Lords, I am immensely grateful to my noble friend Lady Wilcox for giving us the opportunity to speak today. I am probably unique in the speakers list in that at no time in my 76 years have I been involved, actively or passively, in manufacturing. However, I am very proud to have been an apprentice in that great city of Glasgow, known so well to the Minister—an apprentice chartered accountant. The motto of the Institute of Chartered Accountants of Scotland is “Seek the truth”. I can tell noble Lords, there is nothing a chartered accountant cannot do.

That is why, 37 years ago, when Lord Belstead and I were looking at the Patents Bill—a hugely important Bill that updated the law that had existed in the United Kingdom since 1949—he said to me, “Just pop off and learn a bit about the pharmaceutical industry”, so I did. It will give my noble friend Lord Bates on the Front Bench great joy to hear that I will cut my speech right down. I will speak on pharmaceuticals, which is a hugely important industry in your Lordships’ House and around the country, not just because of its intellectual primacy in the United Kingdom but because of its role in manufacturing.

One has to have enormously high qualifications in this branch of manufacturing. In his excellent speech, my noble friend Lord Carrington pointed out how it is entirely necessary to have very high skills. You may start with reasonable skills, but nothing is a lost cause: build them up. That is why we have thousands of young people—I hesitate to call them boys and girls—involved in the pharmaceutical industry. My noble friend can write to me to confirm this later, but I think that the United Kingdom’s pharmaceutical industry is so successful that it runs a £2 billion trade surplus every year. It is a glowing industry that deserves the support of your Lordships and my noble friend.

I want to add a few words on the motor industry. This is the week—it is always in July, or at least it has been for 50 years now—when we sit in front of the television saying, “Hey ho, it’s the British Grand Prix at Silverstone”. For the past 20 years my noble friend Lord Astor and the noble Lord, Lord Drayson, have hosted downstairs representatives of the Motorsport Industry Association. They are representatives, great and small, of the entire motor industry in the United Kingdom. It is suitable that it is held around the time of the British Grand Prix at Silverstone. I do not know which channel it is on, but I hope all your Lordships will be able to look in to give encouragement to the British motorsport industry at Silverstone this weekend.

Silverstone is within striking distance of the heart of what used to be the motor industry. In that particular area of the east Midlands there are hordes of small and medium-sized enterprises, of the type that were fostered by my noble friend Lord Young of Graffham during his great career. Helping SMEs is an ongoing drive and commitment of all Governments. The motor industry is based all around the country, including Coventry, but there is a heavy concentration around Silverstone because they have the facilities there for high-powered testing of components.

Your Lordships will see that an enormous amount—I think 15% to 20%—of the components in most grand prix motor cars originate, are manufactured and are sourced in the United Kingdom. I could be wrong, and I would certainly accept correction. Nobody could have done more to foster the motor industry than my noble friend Lord Young. We can look at Nissan, which is based in the north-east, and also at Toyota and Honda. I do not think he has mentioned it, but we can look at another market we would not necessarily think of: Rolls-Royce, Bentley and BMW are massive contributors to the British motor industry. Those cars are produced here and go all over the world.

I occasionally go to the great city of Liverpool, due to the lightweight Lyell activity of cheering on a great team there. Its motto is, “Only the best will do”. They do not manufacture young men, although they train them well, but plumb opposite their training ground is Halewood, which used to be a major producer of Ford motor cars. Jaguar Land Rover—perhaps that should now be Tata—now produces very high-powered and excellent Jaguar motor cars there. I may be wrong, but I think that the advice I had from the University of Warwick is that it now produces a very upmarket Range Rover called an Evoque at Halewood—if it is elsewhere, I apologise—and I believe that it is now on a three-shift system, such is the demand for them, mainly from China. That is an example of everything my noble friend has been looking for in innovation from young and old people. Young people are brought into it for a career. You can find that success there.

To quickly conclude, I was enormously impressed and encouraged by the advice I had from the University of Warwick, which does everything that should be done for young apprentices. Young boys and girls train from the age of 16 to about 20 or 25. They then either move into the industry or carry on in research on the pathway set out by my noble friend Lord Carrington.