MP appeals for better training as manufacturing comes home

Speaking at a debate on the future of UK industry, he warned employers against complacency and making the assumption that Britain will naturally create a high skill, high pay economy.

“In France, the people that generally are doing the cleaning jobs in Paris are people from Portugal. Two or three hundred years ago, Portugal ruled the world,” Mr Sheerman told the audience.

“People should not be complacent about where we will end up if we don’t concentrate on high skills and high pay when the skills are there.”

However, the Labour MP for Huddersfield said he was encouraged by the trend of “reshoring”. Manufacturers are returning to Britain as a result of higher transportation costs and the benefits of having a cluster of suppliers closer to home, he added.

“Reshoring is a very real trend. It is happening already and will grow,” said Mr Sheerman, who is co-chairman of the Associate Parliamentary Manufacturing Group.

“Some of the people won’t talk about it because they think it will give away their commercial advantage. But they are bringing manufacturing back to this country.”

But he said that the investment in reshoring might mean less jobs, not more, as manufacturing becomes more efficient with new technology.

Mr Sheerman said the trend in European manufacturing nations like France and German is for smaller workforces through greater automation.

Estimates suggest the sector employs between 260,000 and 300,000 people in Yorkshire, making up between 8-10 per cent of the workforce, the Manufactured Yorkshire conference heard yesterday at The John Smith’s Stadium in Huddersfield. The Yorkshire Post was media partner for the event.

Mr Sheerman said just 14 per cent of Yorkshire’s manufacturing workforce has a degree, compared to 19 per cent nationally. He added that 10 per cent of the workforce has no qualification, compared to eight per cent nationally.

He said that in-work training is also below the national average and was generally scathing of the quality of management.

Mr Sheerman, a former long-serving chairman of the education and skills select committee, urged manufacturers to work more closely with the “sleeping giants” of the further education and university sector and to see local institutions as their natural partner.

He was optimistic about the power of new crowdfunding platforms to improve access to finance.

He told the audience: “It is the new democratic way of raising money from the grassroots, from your community, from the international community, to start up in business, to fund your business and bypass the conventional banks.

“That’s how people in this town and this region started. The Yorkshire Penny Bank, our own banks, our own building societies, we grew our own kinds of institutions that our society needed to live the good life of that time.

“I think it’s going to come back and we’re going to give the opportunity, through crowdfunding, to do that. It’s a revolution that’s going to come.”

The Manufactured Yorkshire conference took place at John Smith’s Stadium in Huddersfield to bring together manufacturers and supply chain along with industry leaders.

Terry Scuoler, chief executive of manufacturers’ organisation EEF, told the audience that Yorkshire contributes 10 per cent of the UK’s manufacturing output.

He is seeing an improvement in the proportion of companies planning for growth in faster-growing export markets, but said businesses need to see an over-arching growth strategy from Government which has cross-party support.

“With the right strategy from Government and a constructive partnership with business, manufacturing can deliver the rebalancing for the UK economy,” said Mr Scuoler.

In a debate on the shortage of skills in the sector, EEF regional director Andy Tuscher said there is a misnomer that manufacturing is “a dead and dirty industry” and many young people would prefer a career in reality television.

He said he was “quite horrified” to learn that a university is now offering a degree in rock, giving students the chance to study bands like AC/DC and Motorhead.

Steve Wainwright, a manager at Creative Sheffield, said enthusing young people about manufacturing is “the easy part; the difficult part is where it’s not supported by the teacher, not understood by the careers advisor and then totally knocked out by mum and dad”.

In contrast, he said that Germany has an inherent pride in its manufacturing prowess.