The Burnham Boost for British Manufacturing

It was good to wake up to another upbeat policy announcement from Andy Burnham, in this second week of his premiership, proposing that secondary schools let their students study subjects like manufacturing and AI in addition to core academic learning.  Messages of support for manufacturing have been few and far between for most of the last fifty years.  The mantra has been that Maggie killed UK manufacturing, although more recently the mantle of industrial destroyer has shifted to Ed Miliband. 

Within manufacturing circles it has become a constant complaint that the cost of UK energy is crippling industry, with Ed Miliband’s NetZero policies placing an almost impossible burden on companies trying to compete internationally.  Whether he will supplant Maggie as the chief architect of UK manufacturing decline is something only time will tell, but there was a collective sigh of relief when he was exiled to the Foreign Office.  So, what do these new announcements mean for UK manufacturing and technology?

The plan to encourage youngsters to take a more practical route to a career is very welcome.  Part of it had already been signalled by the recent consultation on the future of vocational V-Levels.  Burnham’s new rhetoric sounds positive, writing that “in the age of AI, practical and technical skills haven’t become less valuable – they’ve become more valuable than ever. Britain will need brilliant engineers, electricians and cybersecurity experts more than ever before.  For the first time, technical education will be at the heart of our curriculum, not bolted onto the sides.”  He added that “for too long, students had been told to take academic subjects and that a technical education should be valued as much as a university degree”.  For those of us who have been promoting STEM for years, that’s music to the ears. 

What’s slightly worrying is that the rationale for this change of policy doesn’t seem to be about strengthening UK manufacturing, but a hope that it might be a lever to reduce the growing number of young school leavers who are Not in Employment, Education or Training, otherwise known as NEETs.  The cost of supporting that growing number is becoming a worry for the Treasury, who need to cut the associated welfare bill.  Andy Burnham has said he’s “on a mission” to reduce the number of NEETs, which is something that I’m sure everyone would support,  But preparing them for manufacturing jobs is only a viable strategy if the conditions are in place to expand manufacturing.  That means reducing energy prices and the cost of employing staff.  Without those changes, it’s eerily reminiscent of Maggie Thatcher’s use of youth training schemes to massage the employment statistics back in the 1980s.  Good for political PR, but no help for UK industry.

Sadly, Andy Burnham’s view that a technical education should be valued as much as an academic one doesn’t seem to apply to his choice of cabinet ministers.  After they were appointed, the Higher Education Policy Institute looked at their first degrees:

Only one minister – the Education Secretary, Lucy Powell, has a first degree in a science subject, although she never pursued that career, going straight into political campaigning.  These numbers show that over half of the cabinet studied politics in some form.  Most of the cabinet ministersm have never had what the majority of people would consider to be a real job.  A similar lack of real world experience applies to most of the rest, although both Angela Rayner and Annaliese Midgely have the benefit of getting out and doing stuff rather than going to university.  Something which Burnham’s new initiative should encourage.

When you stop to think about it, the overabundance of cabinet members who studied politics makes little sense.  These are all people, who at sixteen or seventeen years old, decided (or were encouraged) to do a politics degree.  At that point they had minimal real-world experience, but set foot on the politics treadmill and have never got off.  While the rest of us have been out working and learning about real life, they’ve been climbing the slippery poles of local politics and Westminster, living inside a self-reflecting bubble.  Most are well intentioned, but it’s a selection process which seems to be designed to produce the people least competent to govern.  It almost impossible to argue that this is the best way to select members of Parliament, as recent experience has proven.  But that’s me applying an evidence-based analysis that most of them would not recognise.

I use evidence-base advisedly, as that’s the foundation of what you learn in STEM subjects, but which is so often missing in politics.  We need our ministers to evaluate decisions by thinking about consequences and risk, and not just making knee-jerk reactions.  That lack of risk analysis has been apparent across all parties for most of the last two decades.  It’s a skill which needs to be learnt.  Without it, we see the same mistakes being made again and again.  It’s why our energy prices are the highest in Europe, killing our industrial competitiveness.  It’s why HS2 has been so wasteful.  It’s why we are seeing the same thing happen with the Lower Thames Crossing.  It’s why we need real world experience in Parliament.

In terms of the failure to understand risk, there’s no worse example than Teresa May’s NetZero bill.  Few people remember that it was kicked off by Labour’s Rachel Reeves, who, as chair of the BEIS committee, pressed for a net zero emissions bill.  She strongly supported a target without questioning its cost to the nation.  With Ed Miliband’s subsequent help, that duo have dealt a death blow to UK manufacturing.  That’s apparent in the World Bank’s figures on UK manufacturing as a percentage of GDP.

After the decline of the nineties and early 2000s, UK manufacturing began to grow.  But as the subsidies loaded onto energy prices started to bite, it faltered and fell.  Covid hit it further, but it managed to bounce back, until even higher energy prices and Rachel Reeves’ increased taxation on employment caused it to plummet. 

When the NetZero bill came before Parliament, MPs should have asked pertinent questions.  Hardly any did, failing to understand the consequences.  The main dissenting voices in the debate came from the two backbenchers – Labour’s Graham Stringer and Conservative Kemi Badenoch, both of whom questioned its effect on energy costs, industrial impacts, and practical estimates for infrastructure and workforce requirements.  Stringer and Badenoch seem an unlikely pair, but they have something in common.  They both have a science background and have had real jobs in industry.  That’s an unusual background in British politics.

There is no question that we need to address NetZero, as does every other country in the world.  However, no other country has adopted the approach of Miliband and Reeves, which is currently destroying our manufacturing base.  We need to expand our capabilities to make the products that will help mitigate and reverse climate change.  Most in the manufacturing industry consider the Miliband and Reeves policy as tantamount to national treason.

If we consider why no other country made the same mistake, one answer may be the background of their MPs.  After the last election I did a count of how many MPs had real experience of working in science and technology.  The House of Commons claimed it had risen to 110, but that relied on counting subjects like “Economic Science”.  Economics is not a science, nor are many of the other degrees that the Commons selected to try and tick the STEM box.  If you narrow it down to those who had got their hands dirty, I reckoned that it was 21, representing just 3.2% of our MPs.  Elsewhere in Europe, that percentage is closer to 10%.  That may well be the reason they aren’t killing their manufacturing bases. 

This lack of science and technology experience is worrying.  Like it or not, our lives depend on it, and we need policies to ensure that the UK is good at it, rather than the Reeves / Miliband approach of policies which constrict it.  As the geo-political climate becomes more turbulent, the UK needs to be able to ensure security and living standards.  Technical sovereignty is not just subsidising a steel plant; it’s understanding the supply chain of everything we use.  We can’t make everything ourselves, but we need to ensure we have access to what we need, and to leverage our position to maintain access to the rest.  That means identifying and supporting the expertise that makes the UK important to others within each technology chain.  I suspect few of the cabinet could sustain a conversation on those topics for more than a few minutes.

Having said which, Andy Burnham’s plans are a good step forward, but they’re a tiny one, and we need many more of them.  We also need to make sure that our MPs understand the goal is to grow Britain’s technical independence and not just massage the number of NEETs, all of whom deserve jobs when they’ve finished their training.  Andy Burnham talks of his father’s long-term career in manufacturing as a key influence in his upbringing and work ethic.  We need to bring that back for a new generation.  UK manufacturing will be different in the future, but I am convinced it can be successful.  We need to convince our politicians that they correct their mistakes and concentrate on manufacturing’s future.

As a footnote to anyone who thinks I’m overegging the difficulty of manufacturing, let me ask you a question – “Could you make a pencil?”  And “could you make a factory to make a million of them?”  Whatever your answer, go and download and read Leonard Read’s short essay “I, Pencil”.  It was published in 1958 and remains one of the best descriptions of how the simplest thing contains complexity.  It opens people’s eyes to what lies behind the everyday and advocates establishing an environment that lets creativity flourish.  I would encourage everyone, and especially everyone in Parliament, to read it.