UK Manufacturing Industry

Lord Soley Excerpts

Thursday 8th December 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Soley]

I add my congratulations to my noble friend Lord Haskel. He is one of the few Members of this House who actually puts entries on the Lords of the Blog site about manufacturing. Some noble Lords who have been speaking today should do the same because entries always attract a lot of interest. I am delighted that my noble friend Lord Sugar is going to do one of the television broadcasts that has been organised by the press office of this House, because we need to get the message out about the importance of these debates. They are important in their own right but we should not just be talking to ourselves or to government Ministers, as important as that is. Getting the message out to a much wider base is important as well.

I want to focus on one factor, which is the immense importance of science and technology to the manufacturing process in the modern world economy. In his introduction, my noble friend Lord Haskel reminded us of something that we should keep reminding ourselves about. It is difficult to separate manufacturing from servicing. There is no artificial divide.

An example from my old constituency of Hammersmith is similar to the one given by the noble Lord, Lord Sugar, about what happened with small knife and fork manufacturing industry. When I was first elected there in the 1970s, you could go to the arches under the Shepherd’s Bush railway line, or down to Acton, and peep through the closed doors and find people all manufacturing heaven knows what. When the BBC expanded big time in Shepherd’s Bush, that began to go, and instead there was a growth in design, particularly electronic organisation and manipulation of information. Although we might all complain about the BBC television licence fee, in fact the BBC produces—it manufactures—films that are sold all over the world. We often talk about the impact that gives us in terms of culture, political influence and so on, but actually it is a manufacturing process. People are buying that product.

Somebody has already referred to the good example of the television programme about a week ago on the Rolls-Royce engine. There was an equally good one—the same series—on how we make space satellites. People forget that there are very few satellites orbiting this earth that do not have British products in them. There is a message to be made. There is this overlap.

I would like the Government to bear in mind, in their policies on this, the work done on science and technology that was built up very dramatically by the last Government. I hope and anticipate that this will be continued by the present Government, because we cannot have the advances we are looking for without it. The noble Lord, Lord Cope, seems to feel that the decline in nuclear energy was down to the last Government, but it was not. It was much more serious—an acute concern developed in the 1970s and 1980s about climate change and, very sadly, the green movement got carried away with what I regarded as an anti-science approach. All parties, including those overseas, became infected with the idea that climate change could only be combated by, in effect, a “back to nature” approach. The answer to climate change, which I regard as very serious—I wrote my first article on it back in the 1980s—is not “back to nature” but “forward to science and technology”. That is what will crack it at the end of the day; that is what enables us to deal with it.

Nanotechnology is of immense importance. This is something that this country is doing an awful lot on but an awful lot of people will not know what it is. It is the manipulation of matter at a sub-atomic level, and enables us to develop new products which are self-generated by the nanotechnology that underpins it. We are very good at that in biology, chemistry and so on. We have a lead on that very largely because of the National Health Service, which provides an enormous market for drugs and many other matters related to the advanced technologies. It is time we not only used that in our exports around the world—which we do—but recognised that many people look to the health service; which, for reasons that escape me, we keep reorganising, with some bizarre idea that yet another reorganisation will somehow answer these problems. Many people overseas look to not only the science—the biology and chemistry—underpinning what the National Health Services does for us but to its organisation. We could actually sell that service overseas.

Lastly, I want to mention aerospace. Again, I say to the noble Lord, Lord Cope, that if he wants to avoid the problems that affected nuclear energy, watch out for the Government’s blindness on our hub airport policy. If you want the second largest, most advanced, aerospace industry, you have to have a system of supply underpinning it. If we just carry on with the assumption that we do not need to worry about the underpinning work that is done by having hub airports and so on, it will see the same fate as the rail industry. We invented railways and the Industrial Revolution, but let it slide by not keeping up with the science and technology. Science and technology will drive things forward. That is the message of the Industrial Revolution and we ought to bear it in mind when we are talking about manufacturing and science.