The debate about the growth prospects of the UK economy often focuses on the role of infrastructure investment, especially road and rail investment. The potential of the rail sector has been recognised by the European Community’s in its ambitious plan for investment this decade in R&D, Horizon 2020. The European rail sector has emerged as one where Europe has genuine global strengths, ahead of major global competitors, where it can win an increasing share of world trade.

The climate for rail investment in the UK has been influenced by a major study by a team led by Sir Roy McNulty – the Rail Value for Money Study.  The final study report, Realising the Potential of GB Rail, was published in May 2011. It included a rigorous benchmarking exercise comparing the rail performance of this country with other similar European countries.  McNulty concluded that GB rail suffered from a 30% efficiency gap compared with the best performance in Europe. The report set out a number of recommendations to remove the whole efficiency gap by 2018/2019.

The McNulty recommendations are very wide ranging and cover leadership, clarity of objectives, devolved decision-making, structures and interfaces and regulations. In terms of increasing efficiency the report stressed the importance of improved supply chain management, programme and project management and asset management. The role of innovation, standards and safety is also covered as are various aspects of HR such as training and management development.

In July 2012, the Department of Transport published The High Level Output Specification (HLOS) which sets out information for the Office of Rail Regulation and for the rail industry about what the Secretary of State wants to be achieved  during railway Control Period 5 (April 2014 – March 2019).

The HLOS announced rail investment in excess of £9bn by the end of the Control Period, of which about £5.2bn involves projects already underway and the remainder being for new projects.  The strategy is built around four priorities. The first of these is the creation of the “Electric Spine”, a high capacity passenger and freight electric corridor running from the South Coast through Oxford, Bedford and via the Midland Main Line to the East Midlands and South Yorkshire, with a link from Oxford to the West Midlands and the North-West.

The second strategic priority is to increase capacity and accelerate journey times between key cities, investing in faster trains (Intercity Express Programme) and route improvements. Major new investment is focussed on the Great Western, East Coast and Midland Main Lines. The third strategic priority is better commuter travel into major urban areas, helping people to access a wider range of jobs. A significant investment project is the electrification of the Welsh ‘Valleys’ lines to support the long-term economic renewal of the Welsh economy. There is also investment to support economic growth in the North East, Yorkshire, North West, Midlands, West, and London and the South East. By boosting rail capacity and capability in West and South Yorkshire, enhancing North-Eastern connectivity and completing the Northern Hub, this investment is expected to unlock major economic benefits in the economies of the northern cities and conurbations. The fourth strategic priority is to improve railway links to major ports and airports.

Following the McNulty recommendations the Secretary of State for Transport has set a High Level Output Specification in terms of a limited number of quantified metrics and non-quantified requirements, covering Safety, Reliability, Capacity and Environment plus a high level specification of certain major projects and other investments which the railway sector is to deliver in the Control Period.

Hitahtci has committed to build a new purpose-built factory in Newton Aycliffe to manufacture the trains for the Intercity Express Programme. Building will start in 2013 for opening in 2015. Trains will enter operations from 2017. This project will create 730 jobs with Hitatchi and many times that number in the supply chain. In addition Hitatchi has announced that it will build its new European R&D centre at the same location. They are also building new maintenance depots at Bristol, Swansea, London and Doncaster.

Atkins,  Bechtel, Carillion, CH2M Hill, Parsons Brinckerhoff, Siemens and the Railway Industry Association have come together to form the High Speed Rail Industry Leaders Group. This is intended to be a centre of excellence in rail engineering, operations, funding and regulation. The immediate priorities for this group include assessing the supply chain to identify skills and resource shortages and other constraints. It will also benchmark UK expertise against international experience.  It will establish best practice in terms of cost management and operational management, showcase UK expertise and identify skills development avenues.

BS11000 is proving to be an important standard for the modern GB rail industry as it tackles the efficiency gap. In May 2012 Atkins’ UK rail division is one of the first in the industry to achieve BS11000 accreditation, which provides a framework for collaborative business relationships. The accreditation will require Atkins’ rail business to apply best practice principles to its current ways of working to get the very best out of its business relationships.  Douglas McCormick, managing director of Atkins’ UK rail division, said: “I am delighted that we have achieved BS11000 accreditation. While collaboration has always been around, it has become all the more important to the rail industry following the McNulty Rail Value for Money Study.

Atkins’ BS11000 submission was based primarily on current re-signalling projects in the North of England and the Midlands, particularly the Northampton Silver Re-signalling scheme. Northampton, is being delivered in partnership with Network Rail, has been greatly helped by the collaborative approach that has been taken. From the outset, the combined Network Rail/Atkins project team held joint workshops to establish a ‘Collaboration Charter’ outlining project behaviours, interactions and how the project would be run. The team is also co-located on site which has led to the quick resolution of many issues so far and has meant that the project’s June 2012 commissioning has been kept on track.

The new atmosphere in the industry can also be seen in the recent award by Crossrail and TfL of a £190m contract for 100 escalators. This contract requires a 60% improvement in reliability in a deal which will see Otis maintain the escalators for 30 years. The installation of the new escalators for the tube network is scheduled to start in early 2013, with work commencing from 2014 at the Crossrail stations. According to TfL, each of the 428 escalators across the London Underground network operate intensively for 20 hours a day and need to be built to last.

In addition, under a £45m deal, Kone will install 54 incline lifts on the TfL network, including 49 at Crossrail stations and five at Bank, Greenford and Hammersmith Tube stations . Kone beat Otis, Fujitec, Stannah and Schindler to win the contract for the installation of the lifts.

Industry Forum has in-depth experience of supply chain management, high specification asset management, standards development and certification and the use of high level performance indicators in operational improvement. We are actively evaluating how best to bring our capabilities to support the improved performance that is being sought across the GB rail industry.

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In Russia, India and China some 45 reactors are under construction. Across Europe there are 140 nuclear reactors that are either under construction, in the planning process or under consideration in a total of 23 countries.

If NNB Generation, the joint venture between EDF Energy, Centrica and Areva, decide to build new nuclear reactors at Hinkley, some 25,000 jobs could be created in the nuclear supply chain. EDF, along with their partners, plan to make their final investment decision by the end of 2012.

The cost of a new reactor currently is of the order of £5bn. Competing energy technologies are generally less capital intensive and so discipline in cost estimation and construction performance are key factors in getting the go-ahead on projects. In Japan, time compression has pushed reactor construction time down to 37 months. The scale of these projects is enormous. It has been estimated that constructing a typical nuclear station is three times as complex as building an Olympic park.

A critical element in successful project completion is collaborative and integrated working. This is built around three principles:

1. vision and leadership
2. cultures and behaviours
3. processes and tools

Cultural change is an issue in many organisational fields and in nuclear construction the elements are the same as elsewhere – behaviours that promote trust and fairness, openness, a no-blame approach to problem solving, honesty and transparency. Equally important are the proper use of common processes and tools and an agreed approach to the measurement of performance to achieve mature and effective supply chain relationships.

The creation of an appropriate baseline at the start of the project is also essential. This should cover project governance, reporting and review processes, KPIs and a clear statement of requirements with a comprehensive risk analysis.  All of this has to be underpinned by a single comprehensive information system which enables clear visual management.

An interesting practical case study of developing the nuclear supply chain is to be found in the  Sellafield Supply Chain Coalition (SSCC) which started life in March 2008. The initiative was driven by a desire to achieve global standards set by the World Association of Nuclear Operators. These standards apply throughout the supply chain down to local suppliers at tiers 3 and 4. SSCC adopted an over-arching mission statement: to operate more effectively in order to improve performance through mutual support, exchange of information and emulation of best practices.

Following the precedent set in the automotive and aerospace sectors, SSCC developed the SSCC Improvement Tool. This is based on a continuous improvement workbook that requires self-assessment against a number of standards across 17 modules. Performance against each objective is rated against an eight point scale.

The development phase on the improvement tool started in 2010 and the pilot organisations completed the improvement tool process by April 2012. Their next step was to enter the Verification and Validation phase. This is being done by pairing SSCC members who examine and test the score of their partner. Participants in SSCC regard it as a landmark in supply chain cross-fertilisation within the sector. Currently SSCC is recruiting the next tranche of suppliers to go through the improvement process.

Industry Forum has a depth of experience in supply chain development and has been involved in major projects in the automotive and aerospace sectors which combine global standards with a coherent approach to measurement, improvement and collaboration. It is currently participating in major projects under Advanced Manufacturing Supply Chain Initiative. It also has significant experience in transferring its approach to other sectors such as food and drink and retail. Industry Forum is actively looking for opportunities to collaborate with the UK nuclear sector as it moves into the next phase of its commercial development.

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The CBI has been investigating the UK’s global competitors’ approach to industrial strategy as part of their campaign for the UK to develop a better framework for rebalancing the economy.   As they put it, ‘ most countries have a clear vision that underlies their policy-making, one that highlights where that country sees itself in the global economy.’  This underlying rationale of government action is the basis of a strategy, giving policies a clear direction and providing investor certainty. The CBI wants to learn from other countries’ industrial policies and how they operate in practice and so far they have produced case studies of USA, Israel, France, Germany, South Korea and Singapore.

For example, South Korea has identified 17 future sectors as possible high-growth markets. They have formulated the key capabilities common to these 17 sectors for strategic support and set strategies for 7 of these common capabilities. The strategies include KPI targets and the support mechanisms required to deliver.

The French aim to become a high-tech, innovative economy and are backing several technologies with substantial long-term risk-sharing investment.  They are tackling supply-chain weaknesses to allow pragmatic government investment.

The Israeli strategy is built on a vision that aims to leverage existing national strength in R&D and entrepreneurial start-ups.  They are adopting a trial-and-error approach to the use of policy to overcome identified obstacles, before settling on a number of supporting policies.

The CBI have concluded it is time to fully open up the debate on industrial policy to explore fresh approaches to growth that will make a real difference in the medium to long term. Speaking on the Today programme recently, the Business Secretary, Vince Cable asserted that the Coalition did have an industrial policy that was being pursued energetically, for example via the Catapult Technology Centres.

In the US Presidential campaign, Barak Obama has promised that if he gets a second term he will create a million new manufacturing jobs. The CBI has concluded that currently the US model is built on support for radical innovation, delivered primarily through public procurement.  Public financing of R&D in the US accounts for between 11% and 21% of all R&D undertaken by firm. On top of this, the Small Business Innovation Research Programme and Small Business Technology Transfer programme supports more than 4,500 projects a year, constituting an investment of more than $ 2.5bn on SME research.

Germany is now the country which has the largest share of global trade in manufactures ahead of China, Japan and the US.  Despite this the government claims that it has not got a strategic vision . The CBI finds that for Germany, industrial policy takes the form of a highly embedded cross-government framework to which all parties subscribe. The enduring goal in Germany is to create the right conditions for industrial competitiveness across the board .

It is widely recognised that the Germans make considerable investment in a highly skilled, vocational workforce, which is capable of innovating to create and manufacture advanced products. Close relationships between banks and industry are another positive factor which has been acknowledged by many studies. Collaborative public-private partnerships such as those found in Fraunhofer Institutes have been deliberately modelled by the UK Coalition in launching a series of Catapult Centres.

The CBI plan to assess UK’s current capabilities and comparative advantages, and where could it develop in future and are currently investigating how the UK can maximise growth in existing and new value chains.

On 10th September the Engineering Employers Federation (EEF) added their voice to the industrial strategy debate calling on the Government to provide leadership on growth to get UK economy back on track.  EEF have issued a report, The Route to Growth: a new approach to Industrial Strategy, arguing that progress towards a better-balanced economy has stalled because the government has yet to demonstrate the same relentless and clear-sighted approach to growth that it has done on reducing the deficit.  The EEF believe that the industrial strategy must underpin decisions on how new resources are deployed across government, how existing expenditure is reprioritised to support growth and what activity the government should step back from.

Amidst all this debate, Vince Cable, Business Secretary, drew a number of threads together in a major speech on industrial strategy on 11th September.  SMMT Chief Executive, Paul Everitt, commented that ‘ the Government’s commitment to an industrial strategy is a significant and important development for the recovery and growth of the UK economy. Government’s action and attitude towards the long-term development of our business environment has a significant impact on both private sector investment and the shape and value of our industrial landscape. It is right that the strategy recognises the value of every sector of the economy and works with key industries, through a government-backed ‘business bank’, to increase investment in R&D, skills and capital equipment. The motor industry fully supports the approach outlined by the Secretary of State and will work closely with him and through the Automotive Council to enhance further the UK as a globally competitive location for automotive investment.’

‘While industry has enjoyed recent unprecedented levels of investment from international vehicle manufacturers (more than £6bn in the last two years), the formalisation of an industrial strategy will serve to boost the UK-based supply chain, encouraging further investment and growth. ‘

Industry Forum has been working intensively on the Advanced Manufacturing Supply Chain Initiative which takes a more strategic approach by tackling supply chain development in terms of R&D support, capital expenditure funding and support for training in an integrated fashion. We are working with a number of companies in the automotive and construction equipment sectors to establish integrated plans for developing UK supply chains in line with their global strategies.

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MIT’s Lean Aerospace Initiative has rebranded itself as the Lean Advancement Initiative (LAI), broadening its scope and relevance. Siemens in the US has joined LAI.

Working with the Project Management Institute and the International Council on Systems Engineering, LAI has published a substantial study – The Guide to Lean Enablers for Managing Engineering Programs – edited by Jospef Oehmen of MIT.

Experts from industry, academia and government worked together in 2011 to prioritise the top 10 challenges facing contemporary engineering programs. Using lean thinking they identified 300 best practices in 40 categories to tackle these challenges.  The ten challenges include firefighting, unstable requirements, unclear roles and responsibilities, unsuitable metrics and KPIs and lack of proactive risk management.  The recommended best practices fall under classic lean headings – capture the value defined by key customer stakeholders, map the value stream and eliminate waste, flow the work through planned and streamlined processes and letting the customer stakeholders pull value.

On a related tack, Dan Jones has circulated some reflections on the state of lean practice in firms that he has worked with recently and identified key themes. One theme is that many organisations find it hard to look end-to-end at the horizontal flows of value creating work and to diagnose the systemic causes of waste within them. He recommends starting by mapping the core high-level value streams, observing the biggest delays and the sources and consequences of variability.

Dan’s Lean Enterprise Academy produced an important report last year about introducing lean into the NHS. On the basis of a lot of work in the organisation, LEA concluded that NHS managers are locked in a viscous circle that distracts them from tackling key issues because they are continually responding to new policy initiatives from central government – the “Bermuda Triangle” of management in the NHS. This makes it impossible to support managers in improving patient journeys or to focus efforts on the vital few actions that will make the biggest difference to the performance of the organisation.  What is needed is a period of stability in which hospitals and commissioning bodies can work together to align demand and capacity with the available resources and remove sources of unnecessary variability in the healthcare system.

According to Mark Britnell, head of healthcare, UK and Europe, at KPMG, his recent research has found that… successful healthcare organisations have a strategic and long-term focus on patient value; consciously empower healthcare professionals and give them greater autonomy; systematically apply leading-edge business and care process redesign methods; improve clinical and management information so it is routinely used in day to day activities; and have unambiguous staff performance management and accountability frameworks.

The NHS Institute for Innovation and Improvement is tackling these challenges by developing a special tool set under the ‘productive’ heading. The first unit in the series was The Productive Ward – Releasing Time to Care.  Further units have been developed covering Mental Health Wards, Community Hospitals, Productive Leaders, Operating Theatres, Community Hospitals and General Practices.  The goal for the Productive Ward element of the initiative is to yield savings of £267m by 2014 in 139 acute trusts.

An impact study of the Productive Ward published just over a year ago concluded that for every £1 spent average savings of over £8 should accrue over the four years to March 2014. This is achieved by empowering ward teams to identify areas for improvement by giving them the information, skills and time needed.

The Productive Leader is an important element in this NHS drive – a systematic, evidence-based programme for managers to examine personal, team and organisational activity and instil a culture of improvement at all levels of their organisation.   The program covers individual behavioural change and looking at day-to-day processes to release the time to reinvest in value-adding activities.

The Productive Leader emphasis on both social and technical factors is reflected in some current work by LAI. Research is focusing on the link between systems thinking and socially oriented factors play in high-performing enterprises.  The first steps in this research have emphasised that improvements to the social side of complex systems are still needed. While socially oriented characteristics such as trust, confidence, voice, and loyalty are often perceived as being less important than the technical capabilities, particularly in highly technical environments, studies have found that these capabilities have a significant impact on performance in various complex work systems.

Research about systems competencies at the individual level exists, but there is significantly less understanding about the team, organisational, and system of systems or enterprise levels. As technical experts work in increasingly complex, team-oriented, and cross-functional settings, the role of individual and team interpersonal traits, as well as individual and collaborative systems thinking, becomes more critical. The next steps in the LAI research is to define the critical socially related competencies that influence high performance, develop measures for these capabilities, and explore the role of context in influencing social capabilities and high performance.   Critical areas identified for further inquiry include:

• Achieving and sustaining alignment between an organisation’s technical systems and collaborative work systems
• The role of (intra-organisational) social media and meetings in enabling or inhibiting performance
• The taxonomy of social capabilities, measures and enablers
• Exploring how social capabilities relate to enterprise performance and profitability
• Strategies for managing the social dimension in an uncertain environment
• The balance of incentive and reward structure as related to context and environment

Early in the development of Industry Forum it was realised that social and leadership skills were a key element of successful business improvement initiatives and our portfolio was expanded accordingly. IF has transferred its approach to a number of manufacturing and service sectors. It has worked in complex engineering systems particularly in the aerospace sector.

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Commentators have been calling on the Coalition recently to develop an industrial strategy. In fact the Defence Industrial Strategy and Life Sciences Strategy are already in place. At the end of May the Technology Strategy Board (TSB) launched the UK’s High Value Manufacturing Strategy. This follows the increased priority that the previous government placed on advanced manufacturing. It also links into the industrial strategy that the EU are developing as part of the Europe 2020 project supported by the large Horizon 2020 R&D programme.

The UK’s High Value Manufacturing Strategy is based on work done by the Institute for Manufacturing at Cambridge University. At the heart of the strategy are twenty-two competences grouped under five headings – Resource Efficiency, Manufacturing Systems, Materials Integration, Manufacturing Processes and Business Models.

Resource efficiency is a priority because of the increasing scarcity of natural resources and the need to reduce manufacturing’s carbon footprint. It includes the design and manufacture of lightweight vehicles and also the use of biotechnology in developing new pharmaceutical products. Manufacturing systems include the process engineering capability needed in the food industry. Virtual design and simulation testing are also key elements of the new systems approach.

Materials Integration embraces the creation of innovative products by integrating new materials, coatings and electronics with new manufacturing technologies. This must be supported by new manufacturing processes which are more agile and more cost-effective.  Concurrent engineering is needed to reduce product development time scales.  New Business Models are emerging with complex international value chains. Skills acquisition and retention will be absolutely essential to success.

The Strategy identifies the sectors with most potential for high value manufacturing – food  & drink, marine, aeronautics & automotive, pharmaceuticals, computers electronics & optics, chemicals, machinery & equipment, metals & castings and electrical equipment.

Within the 9 level model of Technological Readiness developed by NASA, the Technology Strategy Board funds the five steps in the middle of the development chain from experimental proof of concept to system prototyping demonstration in an operational environment. The two upstream stages are covered by the UK and EU research system. The research sector in the UK has a related strategy – Manufacturing the Future – which links with this strategy as do several EU programmes such Factories of the Future.

The High Value Manufacturing Catapult has a central role in carrying out the Strategy. Of the £50m a year which TSB expects to invest about half is likely to go the Catapult. In addition the TSB will help UK firms access the relevant EU funding programmes. It would make sense as well to build strong links to the relaunched Manufacturing Advisory Service.

SEMTA has just started offering a Higher Apprenticeship for Advanced Manufacturing paving the way to technical skills crucial for job creation and growth. This apprenticeship is intended to offer an attractive alternative to university. The new framework is available at levels four and six and offers many pathways to meet the needs of different sectors.

Industry Forum has in depth experience of many of the sectors covered by the Strategy – including international work and supply chain development. Throughout IF’s existence the objective has always been to lift value added per person which is one Industry Forum’s key performance measures.  The Strategy documentcan be viewed on the Technology Strategy Board website.

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The pharmaceutical industry is a major UK manufacturing sector with an exemplary export record generating gross value added the same order of magnitude as the aerospace sector. The NHS is a major domestic customer of the sector. UK pharmaceuticals are also important in terms of business funded research and development in the UK. Many European, Japanese and American owned pharmaceutical companies fund major research groups in the UK. About a fifth of the top 100 medicines in use worldwide today originated from research in the UK – a record second only to that of the United States. Regions with a high concentration in the industry are the South East, the North West, and the East of England. Manufacturing and research in the UK are intricately linked and strengthened by the local skills supply, the proximity of a significant supply-chain chemical industry and the national demand from the NHS. Employment has been stable over the past decade.

The progress of globalisation is bringing major challenges to the UK pharmaceutical sector. Large multi-national pharmaceutical companies are restructuring their business models to a significant degree and this has led to a number of site closures and redundancies.  Many multifunction sites are being rationalised into more focused operational units. There is increased outsourcing and collaboration with supply chain companies. There is a shift to ‘generics’ as the patent lifetimes of the ‘blockbuster’ drugs of the twentieth century expire opening up competition from low-cost manufacturers. The competitive response is to invest in assimilating new technology and fast-track knowledge transfer into new products.

The Government reaction has been to develop and publish a national life sciences strategy at the end of 2011. This includes a number of important actions, for example:

• Increasing the speed and efficiency of routes to market approval for innovative, breakthrough therapies
• Developing a regulatory environment for the adoption of innovative manufacturing technology
• Major funding commitments such as £130m for Stratified Medicine and £180m for a Biomedical Catalyst Fund

The broader industry employs approximately 150,000 people, 70,000 in pharmaceuticals, 50,000 in medical technologies and 30,000 in medical biotechnologies. In the pharmaceuticals industry over 70% of the workforce are at the Technical/Process Operator level or above. A large higher skilled workforce is supported by a significant Technical workforce, and manufacture requires significant Process Operator workforce.  The sector currently mainly recruits graduates even for jobs that do not require graduate skills. Many are not motivated long term to work in, for example, laboratories. The sector wants graduates who have the employability skills required for a long-term career with increased collaboration with Academia for research and knowledge transfer. The sector is also moving away from traditional set “job roles” to multi-skilling and a diversification of workforce skills. This move has increased the demand for business skills combined with academic skills to allow the UK life sciences sector to complete globally. The future development of the industry means that skills will change with increasing interdisciplinarity and the change in manufacturing processes will stimulate a requirement for significant workforce development.

The most critical, and hardest-to-fill occupations, are those of the scientific and technical variety. Up to 25% of graduate entrants may be directed to occupations that are lower than the indicative level of their qualification.  The significant numbers of the graduates recruited each year are just a tiny fraction of the supply from Higher Education in a given year. Simply raising the numbers of graduates in shortage or hard-to-fill disciplines would be a poor method of improving supply, given the low gearing of supply to demand. Other interventions are necessary to improve security and quality of supply. In the future, a large proportion of the Technical workforce will be at graduate level and some Process Operators will also be highly skilled. Jobs requiring graduate skills in the workforce of today will become increasingly postgraduate in the industry of tomorrow.

Cogent, the sector skills council that covers the pharmaceutical industry has launched its Skills Action Plan for Growth in UK Life Sciences. The Skills Action Plan sets out four key actions for immediate progression:

ACTION 1:
Resolve actions on skills signals across employers and universities, ensuring that information on skills for the bioeconomy is up-to-date and published periodically.  Use the evidence to drive a two-way communication between employers and universities and colleges to seek skills solutions.

ACTION 2:
Seek new ways to meet urgent highly specialised skills gaps

ACTION 3:
Deliver exemplar vocational pathways to higher education by widening the talent pool and establishing alternative pathways to the degree route via apprenticeships

ACTION 4:
Broker a laboratory placements scheme. There is a lack of opportunities available to encourage the exchange of talent and ideas between academia and industry. To strengthen the science base across the sector, a brokerage solution is needed to facilitate laboratory placements with particular consideration of how to engage SMEs.

A report on progress with these actions has just been published and can be sourced at  www.cogent-ssc.com/general/news/04_04_12_LSAR.php

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The Centre for Industry and Government at the Institute for Manufacturing  (IfM) at Cambridge University have just published some important new survey based research on public attitudes to manufacturing in the UK in partnership with YouGov-Cambridge. The research explores public attitudes to ‘rebalancing the UK economy’, an important theme in the Coalition’s economic policy statements. The Coalition is not the first administration to be concerned about public attitudes to manufacturing – New Labour administrations also shared this concern.

The IfM summarise the main findings from the survey as follows:

• The public have a confused picture of whether  the  UK has a manufacturing base or not, with many saying we don’t make anything anymore but the majority overestimating the share of the economy, in terms of GDP, that is manufacturing related
• Contrary to the expected narrative, the public have a good sense of manufacturing as being high-tech and requiring high levels of skills
• However, there is a lack of faith in manufacturing jobs, as they are thought to be the first to leave the country and not to pay as well as other industries
• Even in that context, the public overwhelmingly agree that we need a strong manufacturing base and that rebalancing can be achieved
• However, they do not have faith that either the government or industry know what to do to strengthen the manufacturing base
• Compared to a similar sample in the US, the US public has a significantly more positive impression of manufacturing, in terms of it being high-tech and being well paid
• Labour, Liberal Democrat and Conservative voters agree that the Coalition is not doing enough to support manufacturing and support the targeting of sectors of national importance

These results are quite surprising e.g. the strength of support for rebalancing the economy towards manufacturing and it is worth speculating how far unbalanced media reporting has helped reinforce the negative perceptions of manufacturing in terms of pay levels and job instability. In fact the UK median gross annual salary in manufacturing in 2009 was approximately £25,000 whereas the median for all service industries was close to £20,000.
In terms of rebalancing the economy, the UK public strongly agree (72%) that there the share of the economy based on manufacturing needs to significantly increase and that such rebalancing needs to include a geographic rebalancing between the South East and the rest of the country (59% agree). There are strong regional differences in whether geographic rebalancing is necessary, with the North having very strong agreement (71%) compared to a much weaker response from the East (47%) and London (48%).

IfM note that given the long standing opposition to industrial policy, and the strategy of ‘picking winners’, across government since the late 1980s, it is surprising that 62% of UK adults agree that the government should target sectors which are of national importance. This may indicate that a reluctance to be more targeted in the support of specific sectors is a Westminster idea that is not reflected in the mind of the public.

IfM also draw some wider recommendations from the research in terms of the Coalition’s objective of rebalancing the economy:

• Efforts to improve the image of manufacturing should acknowledge that the public has a clear image of manufacturing as being high technology and demanding high levels of skills
• Future campaigns on manufacturing need to address the current public narrative of low wages and low job security so that careers in manufacturing are represented accurately
• The public agrees (62%) that sectors of national importance should be targeted
• Only 29% of the public currently agree that government understands what is needed to strengthen and grow the economy

Over the years Industry Forum has joined in various projects to provide school children with a more realistic and up to date idea about manufacturing such as the Learning Grid. Projects such this need to continue and expand and science and technology teachers in schools need to be helped to provide reliable guidance to their pupils about the interest and rewards of a career in manufacturing.

The full IfM report is available at www.ifm.eng.cam.ac.uk/service/news/default.html#security

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