Dr Ashok Kumar

Labour Party | Middlesbrough South and East Cleveland

East Cleveland Advertiser Article – Manufacturing

East Cleveland – along with the whole of the Teesside area – was born of manufacturing. It was East Cleveland that supplied the ironstone that made the steel that made the ships, the bridges and the machinery of empire.

Manufacturing is still important today. Nationally it creates a sixth of our national output, 60% of all our exports and employs three and half million people in this country. It is a key economic driver for the North East, and – crucially – it is still expanding in this region. Cambridge Econometrics estimate that by 2010 manufacturing will be contributing 25.5% of the total Gross Value Added for the North East, compared to an average of 18.7% for the rest of the UK. Manufacturing employs around 175,000 people in the North East, on some 6,000 separate sites, and with some 2, 000 of those companies exporting their goods across the world. In the North East, the heartland of manufacturing is on Teesside. We have the biggest cluster of chemical plants in the UK, a still important steel making presence, and have developed technologies in process engineering and marine engineering that are world beaters. I know this well – before I became an M.P. I worked in steelmaking locally for some 15 years.

The Government continue to stress the importance of manufacturing to the UK. Budget after budget has seen more cash given to promoting tax breaks for firms wishing to invest in improving their manufacturing excellence, and for investing in advanced Research and Development. This has paid off. We have the highest level of employment in this region and on Teesside ever. More people are working than ever before, and with youth unemployment – the great scourge of the past – now nearly extinct.

Yet we must not be complacencent. We still see closures in manufacturing – like the loss of Samsung some weeks ago – and, despite the optimism of local managers, there is still a hill to climb and a lot of work to be done before we can say that Corus’s Teesside operations are totally ensured for the future.

That is why I spoke at a recent rally in Newcastle organised by regional Trade Unions – Amicus, the Transport and General Workers and the GMB, and who were concerned that more needed to be done to both boost investment and protect jobs. They were right to raise these issues. After all, it is manufacturing that at the end of the day brings home the bacon in terms of export orders, wealth creation and the increasing appliance of science. Britain was once called the ‘workshop of the world’ and that workshop was centred in areas like our own. The ingenuity, skills and talents of the Teesside workforce are still with us, and with those talents harnessed to active government support the North East workshop should be good for decades to come.

Dr Ashok Kumar M.P.