The announcement of a multi-billion engineering contract for the North East a few weeks ago confirms the government’s commitment to the north and into creating an enterprise economy based on its traditional strengths in manufacturing and engineering.
Almost a year ago the Labour Cabinet in full pre-election gear road into Durham for a special meeting of the Cabinet the centre piece of which was supposed to be a pre-election announcement of a train order with Hitachi which would bring hundreds of jobs to County Durham.
Sadly the same week the mothballing of the TCP Corus Steel plan was confirmed with the loss of thousands of skilled jobs on Teesside. The decision, or, calculation was made that the ‘good news’ of the train announcement may have been lost in the bad news of the Corus plant closure and so the announcement was pulled.
One year later and we have a Conservative Secretary of State, Philip Hammond, proudly announcing the awarding of a £4.5 billion contract for new rolling stock to be built in County Durham-home of the railways.
The news of the trains contract arrived just after it was announced by Secretary of State, Vince Cable that a buyer had been found for the Corus TCP plant-SSI and the plant would be re-opened creating thousands of new jobs, which followed a personal intervention by prime minister David Cameron whilst meeting with Tata in India last year.
Last week Chancellor George Osborne the government has announced plans to create new style Enterprise Zones which did so much to create wealth and jobs in the north in the eighties;
These announcements themselves came on top of commitments by the Government to a £350 million upgrade of the Tyne & Wear Metro;
A grant of £20 million to Nissan to build a new electric vehicle plant in Sunderland creating or safeguarding 2000 manufacturing and engineering jobs across the supply chain;
An investment of £30 million for NaREC (National Renewable Energy Centre) in Blyth to help build new offshore wind turbine test facilities and a further 12.4 million to help firms in the wind industry develop a manufacturing and assembly hub on the north bank of the Tyne.
In addition to these specific measures aimed at boosting manufacturing in the regions the government has also announced that:
The Regional Growth Fund of £1.4 billion will have a bias to those regions which will be hit most by the reductions in public expenditure;
A National Insurance Contributions holiday for new start ups outside of London, the south East and Eastern regions.
The North East has just had two record quarters of export performance and these announcements will ensure that manufacturing in the North East under this government continues to be a driver of economic recovery in the North and for the UK as a whole.
( 2 comments ) Tags: Blyth, Corus, David Cameron, Durham, Hitachi, North East, Regional Growth Fund, Tata, Teeside, Vince Cable
Comment by Ray Turner on March 15, 2011 at 11:02 pm
Yes. Good news. Manufacturing is critical to the future success of the UK.
So too is science. Prof Brian Cox is inspiring people on TV at the moment, with his excellent series. He’s said (“Start the Week”, BBC R4, 14/3/11) that he’s at a loss to understand why Britain doesn’t invest more in Science.
I reckon it is because there isn’t a quick profit in science, so that’s not compatible with our short-sighted, greedy, money-oriented society at the moment, but if we want to be prosperous world leaders again we’ve got to take the risk of investing more in science.
Particularly if we want safer alternatives to nuclear power, for reasons that are very apparent this week..
A Century ago we we in an exciting age of new discoveries which fuelled the 21st Century, warts and all. The race into space gave us all sorts of exciting new developments…
We now need to take some additional steps forward.
Even if Cold Fusion did prove to be laughable a few years ago, that’s still an example of the sort of advancement that we do desperately need.
Who knows what else we might discover, if sufficient resources are applied…
Comment by Edward Richardson on March 18, 2011 at 12:42 am
There is obvious concern following the collapse of Japan’s nuclear plants, and therefore the future build programme for nuclear in the UK. What amazes me both my father and brother were involved in the coal industry. My father as a chief designer for a coal mining equipment company, and my brother an assistant manager of a mine in Lancashire. They both said we sit on 250yrs of coal measures in the Uk yet as a nation this resource is forgotten under the mantra of being green. Carbon capture, scrubbing exist as known technologies to run modern efficient power stations. Reopening coal mines would create work, create our own raw material for power thats safe and here, not in volatile areas of the world. .So why do you do nothing about it?. You continue with FIT for solar which is absurd and provides no base level and will never provide us with any meaningful power supply yet you fund it, Wind power funding should be for wind farms, onshore or offshore not for individual sporadic development.
The most enlightened development for renewables is tidal power – the wave hub at St Ives in Cornwall and what do you do – not fund it properly. When are you as a Government going to start to resolve our power shortfall and invest in the science that could lead the world.