Helping support UK industry- why it's worth it.

bartyp – Member

Anyone want some statistics?

Oh for goodness’ sake. I was actually going to post about this before you did, but didn’t think it was necessary.

What you’re showing there is manufacturing falling as a percentage of GDP. This isn’t because of weakness in manufacturing; it’s because of strength in GDP. Other sectors have grown faster; this doesn’t mean that manufacturing has declined.

You could reverse this trend by, for instance, abolishing the banking industry. Hurrah! Manufacturing as a proportion of GDP just grew massively. And GDP just collapsed.

Essentially you’re bemoaning the fact that we’re massively succesful at manufacturing and also other industries.

Similiarly, the decline in jobs is obviously a problem for people that did those jobs but it’s not due to a decline in manufacturing, it’s due to changes in manufacturing- greater automation, a smaller number of higher skilled workers producing more. Would you rather have 10 people manually operating lathes or 1 person overseeing 10 cnc machines producing far more?

Keeping to a high-employment, low-skill, low-value manufacturing industry would cost us production, not increase it.

Well quite clearly the best F1 cars are made here. For other types of cars you’ll have to define “better” – if you’re after the best large saloon car, then I think they’re currently made in Spain.

Not sure who has the bigger automotive industry – I suspect we might make more here.

Not sure who has the bigger automotive industry – I suspect we might make more here.

In terms of total numbers they seem to make about 4 times more than we do

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_motor_vehicle_production

Unfortunately just as we started to make really good cars, the Germans bought them, stole the tech and then shut them down.

so the Mini factory (near Oxford?) that was featured just the other day on the gogglebox must actually be a German exclave, and the UK citizens that work there are just slaves?

quite a bit of the German automotive industry is not actually German. UK and Austria both feature, and not just at the bolting bits together stage.

Another point is that the the importance of manufacturing and where it is in the value chain varies within the uk. If you are in London and SE the future of manufacturing might not occupy you much. In the north it feels a more vital and important issue.

There seems to be some conflation here. German cars are German cars regardless of where they’re made, no?
Otherwise aren’t cotics Taiwanese? And all of this stuff (alluded to here) which we design is just far eastern?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_motor_vehicle_production

Germany makes four times as many.
Quality, not quantity though is the important bit.

Well much of the stuff we’re alluding to here is designed in the UK and then the complex parts made or assembled here. We buy the simple/standard stuff from cheaper places who are good at making them in large volume.

Cotic is British only by design which is slightly different to the above and what most people are talking about I reckon.

so the Mini factory (near Oxford?) that was featured just the other day on the gogglebox must actually be a German exclave, and the UK citizens that work there are just slaves?

I was talking about British cars made in Britain, that was all.
You’ve unnecessarily gone off on one old chap! 🙂

Of course we make cars for foreign companies, and we do it exceedingly well.

When was the last time you bought a decent bit of furniture? And where was it made?

I bought this:

This is what they say about themselves:

They are proud to be producing each piece to order in the UK by hand

Loads of O&G industry stuff is still made and / or designed in the UK, for use all over the world.

Northwind is right on automation reducing manufacturing jobs, I worked in a semiconductor factory and the shift team size was tiny as everything that could be was run by machines / robots.

To some extent you can blame also Labour for a big demise in our old industrial base, they nationalized a lot of car, plane, steel companies etc and then over time the management / unions / whoever, messed up and they went down the pan. Also it didn’t help they handed over the Trent jet engine to the Russians’ FFS! 👿

Britain does quite well in boat building both at the luxury end and the small dinghy market many of which are made here.

Biggest problem we suffer over the years is the often quite violent currency swings, both up and down valuing sterling at the moment we’re coming off the down value gaining strength against the Euro which has an adverse effect on export.

I bought this:

I give up whatisit?

bellerophon – Member

I bought this:

A strepsil?

I think poor barty p is still shill bidding for his bike building friends with this post.

However many have realised there are factories overseas which produce product cheaper and technically far superior to much of the stuff MADE here, even UK bike designers realise Taiwanese factories can and do produce a simply superb products that no one in the UK can match for the price.

The world has moved on.

That list of “british” car manufacturers, how many are actually british..

Mini, BMW,
Jaguar, Tata
etc
etc

Does it matter that the companies are able to off shore profits? that the plants and assets aren’t actually british??

The whinge is about what “we” make here. You’d be as well asking whether or not it mattered if things were made by immigrants.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/food-and-drink/wine/lets-get-fizzical-why-english-wine-is-sparkling/

I think poor barty p is still shill bidding for his bike building friends with this post.

I must admit that was my first thought when I clicked on the link & saw the first pic! He’s persistent if nothing else!

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/news/father-time-why-george-daniels-is-the-worldrsquos-best-horologist-2067792.html

In fact Hondas made in Swindon were about as good as you’d get, Worldwide.

And isn’t the Nissan factory in Sunderland the most efficient?

As for other stuff, I’d rather sit in an office designing bits of refineries, than working on an oil rig any day. Same goes for most people I imagine, would you rather weld 100 Cotic souls in a workshop on an industrial estate, or design it?

would you rather weld 100 Cotic souls in a workshop on an industrial estate, or design it?

actually I’d prefer to do both – that would be a cool & varied job. Not the most efficient means of production though probably.

i rather feel that industry is the guilty party here. i was fortunate enough to be offered an apprenticeship when i finished tech, and i had other friends from school who went straight in. how many opportunities are there like that now? industry doesn’t want to train staff. it must be about that time of year for one of the industry bodies to bemoan the fact that the kids they get now ‘aren’t equipped for the world of work’, ie aren’t moulded in to exactly what they want when they get turned out, so they have to spend time and money to train them. it’s such a well worn trope.
see also – ‘massive house build targets put in jeopardy by shortage of skills’, from the same industry that tells my brickie mate, every time he goes to the next job, ‘well we can’t pay what we did last time’, so funnily enough he’s fecked off to something else. 🙄

if you want a bike made in this country go buy a BTR? designed and built by two guys in a shed. pay the premium, fill yer boots.

Brompton is an anomaly; a UK bike manufacturer which is actually growing rapidly. Great design, and very successful marketing. However; most of the bits are actually made abroad. Including the Sturmey Archer hubs. Sturmey Archer, I wonder what happened to them…

What happens when Brompton decide to move production to somewhere with cheaper labour costs?
1.
Sturmey Archer was shut down by a Brit who bought the dying remnants of Raleigh, asset stripped it and sent everything to auction. SunRace saw this and made an offer before the auction to buy all of Sturmey Archer’s IP and tooling etc. they shipped it back to Taiwan spent 2 years working out what they’d bought then started producing SA gears again, including some stuff that hadn’t been made for 40 or 50 years. This was because they saw the value in it, and not what happens in the UK of just thinking about the short term.
2.
Brompton isn’t an anomaly – basically they make the best folding bike in the world – there’s a reason people buy them particularly if they have mixed mode journeys. Oh, and they are moving away shortly from Brentford west London. They’re going to Greenford because they need more room. there was a famous TV programme where “experts” went into companies and told them to off-shore everything because that’s where the money is. Brompton told them to bugger off, as they’d lose what it was that made them successful.

The springs and wire formed parts for Bromptons are manufactured in the UK.

Oh, and the main frames, forks and stem of Bromptons are made in the UK.

FWIW Honda in Swindon, Nissan in Sunderland and Toyota in Burnaston have all topped either internal company league tables or international league tables at some point or another regarding ROI, quality, productivity and warranty returns.

And as an interesting aside a mate of mine was at Burnaston from day 1, the Japanese managers spent the entire set up phase tearing their hair out as everyone was arguing about the best way to build the cars, the Oriental model is that the shop floor workers do what they are told by management and any changes are incremental and managed (Kaizen type stuff) the brits pretty much did what they wanted (within limits of course!) changed stuff, moved stuff around and so on.

IIRC the factory was the best in Toyota outside of japan within 6 months and took top spot after less than 18 months. Unheard of then and AFAIK never been repeated.

Ironically the success of the Nissan Sunderland plant is based on low cost and efficiency and out competing the rest of the Nissan Reno plants for the next model. Basically the business model the Far East first used against uk firms. Very little r&d happens there and it’s not got the greatest links to the local supply chain. It’s very different to the niche high value sucesses elsewhere in this thread. Part of the reason it’s so efficient is everyone is shit scared it will go if it isn’t.

Remind me who makes better cars software to defeat the testing regime

FTFY

Those statistics above prove our manufacturing industry is shrinking. Unbelievable that so many on here are in obvious denial of the facts. Our skills base is evaporating. People are less and less able to make and fix stuff. Less decent stuff is made here. You simply can’t argue with that. Saying ‘oh but we’re really good at F1 or this or that’ is just burying your head in the sand.

Maybe so, but is that something to worry about? What’s left is high-value, high performance manufacturing and high level skills. Sure we farm out the drudgery to other countries, where it’s cheaper and easier to make, but that’s not necessarily a BAD thing. Just a way of progressing. If everyone were busy making nuts and bolts, no-one would be making planes. The romantic view of core manufacturing skills being the backbone on which everything rests is a nonsense – sure you need some capacity, but there’s no need for it to be measured and missed. Now it’s just as easy to jump on a plane and fly to somewhere to organise your quality manufacturing at a much lower cost and much higher profit than it is to get it done here unless you do it in house (which is what many top-end manufacturers do). While I believe the engineering world needs to know the basics to understand how it’s done, I don’t think it really needs a bottom heavy iron-bashing base to be successful. If the markets fell apart and it became cheaper and better to make it here we could. It would take some re-jigging, but the skills still exist and are still taught, just rarely used.

Maybe so, but is that something to worry about?

He was wrong anyway, he misinterpreted the statistics.

I do a bit of woodwork. The UK used to produce some of the finest tools in the world. Now, several other countries (including China) make tools to the same or very similar design, but we don’t. The US, Japan, Sweden and Germany in particular, make superb tools of all types.

My uncle Mike was chief design engineer for a company called Wadkin Bursgreen. 😛

One of my sea rods, It even sounds good ‘Carbon Metal Express’ Made by Century Composites in County Durham.

CME-primary by jimmyg352[/url], on Flickr

Who cares if we’re less skilled at making stuff? It’s not the only way to run an economy…

And this sums up why so many of you absolutely fail to see the cost of everything, and the value of nothing.

Who cares? Future generations will, when all they are capable of is taking stuff off an assembly line, and putting them in boxes. When they have to pay a fortune for anything decent, and have to put up with cheap shit from abroad, because that’s all they can afford. When the only bikes they can afford will be nasty cheap crap from Halfords (all the small independent bike shops will have closed down by this time). And all those jobs their ancestors did, that earned them so much money, are now being done by people in foreign lands, whose governments saw the value in investing in industry.

As for ‘economics’; you can blether on about how we do this that and the other so well, but the reality is that there are less and less jobs which require such genuine skills in this country. You can’t just come up with exceptions and hope they prove the rule. We are entering a future where our kids will not be able to get an education, because they can’t afford the debt. When they can’t afford to buy a house, because it’s all been bought by affluent foreigners (who’ve made their money in manufacturing stuff they sell to us). And they’ll have no skills because we’ve been too lazy to teach them, content instead to just buy stuff from abroad, because it’s cheaper.

He was wrong anyway, he misinterpreted the statistics.

I didn’t; it’s a fact that our economy is shrinking in global terms, and we are being overtaken by other nations. Who are making stuff. The kind of stuff that we used to make. Really well. Do you genuinely believe that those nations making the basic stuff won’t eventually catch up? Are you that blinkered and naive?

Germany has progressed as an economic power. They are still making stuff, at all levels. They have retained their skills base. We’re in danger of losing ours all together.

“Northern Power House” … which genius come up with that shite? 😆

You’re right that our economy and our future are a mess but thank God you’re not in charge of policy if you think a massive debt crisis, globalisation, climate change and an ageing population will be resolved by increasing the size of our manufacturing sector! If was that simple, do you think we’d be in such a mess??

it’s a bit of a First Worlder’s rant if you ask me. Look at the situation from the point of a Chinaman who used to be a peasant farmer and now lives in a city with a well-paid factory job and a hell of a lot more wealth than he ever dreamed of… what looks bad to you is a massive gain for a significant proportion of the population of what we used to call the Third World…

British Lamb is the best.

it’s a fact that our economy is shrinking in global terms, and we are being overtaken by other nations.

What you mean is: ‘other countries are making money by mass-producing stuff’… Right?

Good, that means more customers for our small-volume, high-quality exports.

Whisky, jet engines, really nice shoes, cnc-machined mtb brakes, etc. etc. They all want more rich overseas customers.

If that means we (the UK) drops off the top 10 (or whatever) richest countries list, then that’s ok by me, and my employer, and our research partners. More rich countries please -our exports need them!

We still do plenty of research, set standards etc. Why make bikes which are of low skill when we can be designing and making high value stuff.

This is what you said

Those statistics above prove our manufacturing industry is shrinking.

.. and that was wrong because you continue to look at share of the economy, not the gdp attributable to maufacturinh. Every developed country has declined as a proportion of world trade, even Germany and in the last 25 years they declined even more than us. So the vast majority of what you say is wrong including lauding Raleigh bikes, they were the biggest pile of crap ever.

Oh, and the main frames, forks and stem of Bromptons are made in the UK.
and look at how pricey the built up bikes are and how poor the components are .I cant afford to buy British if it`s going to cost more than something from overseas