Back manufacturing R&D, government told
Midlands manufacturers are warning that unless more is done to nurture innovation industry will suffer.
Speaking at Insider’s New Opportunities in Manufacturing Forum - held at the Coventry TechnoCentre yesterday - Gary Kirtley-Paine, a purchasing director at Jaguar Land Rover, said: “There needs to be some support from government that allows research and development to be tax efficient. We need to be able to encourage people to continue to spend on R&D when we are in a low.
"When there is a downturn it’s one of the first things that gets cut.”
Identifying key issues the manufacturing sector is facing, Simon Griffiths, chief executive of the Manufacturing Advisory Service - West Midlands, told the 70-strong audience: “Companies haven’t got the confidence to invest in things such as equipment. Skill levels are not where they should be. And unfortunately during the recession it’s the older employees who tend to leave the companies and they have the high skill levels. They don’t necessarily come back and that’s a long-term loss.”
Dr Mark Jolly, a senior lecturer in the department of mechanical and manufacturing engineering at the University of Birmingham highlighted another issue that could have a marked impact on the manufacturing sector. “We get a lot of overseas students in engineering but the UK Border Agency has just said that overseas students can’t do internships. We are going to have a massive problem there as they contribute to the economy,” he said.
But the outlook for manufacturing isn’t all gloomy. Bryan Campbell, executive chairman of Coventry’s Envisage Group, said: “From our part of the business the bad news is finished. We’re as busy as we’ve ever been and we have been for the last 12 months.”
And Kirtley-Paine at JLR - which recently announced it will be keeping both its Castle Bromwich and Solihull plants open - said: “We’ve come out of the recession with a very ambitious new cycle plan that we’ve embarked on.”
But he warned that there is still a need for caution. “We need to get to our break even point so that we can support the cycle plans we are trying to go towards but also to make sure that if there another downturn in the market that we don’t end up destroying all the good work we’ve done in the first eight months of this year,” he said.
