From workplace savings schemes and more generous sick pay to making big tech and social media pay for fraud, or the setting up of an AI champion for small and medium-sized businesses and making the annual budget a fixed date in the political calendar the range of suggestions have been extensive.
Make UK, Britain’s manufacturers organisation, has urged whoever forms the next government to institute an economic vision that places the importance of manufacturing at the heart of every ministerial portfolio.
It’s called for a bold, long-term industrial strategy as well as for a skills revolution throughout the education and training system to provide future talent, as well as the upskilling and re-training of the current workforce.
According to Make UK such a policy would help the UK exit what the organisation calls the country’s ‘anaemic holding pattern’ of the past few years and enable it to take advantage of the opportunities provided by rapidly accelerating technologies, investment in infrastructure and the move to a greener economy.
Commenting, Make UK CEO, Stephen Phipson, said, “The policy landscape in which manufacturers operate has changed significantly in recent years and more changes are yet to come, from the transition to net zero to rapidly accelerating and game-changing technological change. We need a vision from the next government which recognises the scale of these challenges.”
He calls for a vision that should include a long-term, robust, modern industrial strategy that can withstand the political chopping and changing that any political cycle is likely to experience and that goes beyond 2030.
There’s nothing that is really new in this document, however. It’s a sensible list of ideas that could have appeared in many of the manifestos published by any of the leading political parties over the past forty years.
But beyond an industrial strategy and the need to retrain and upskill the workforce there’s also a call to boost manufacturing exports, which raises an interesting but unmentionable challenge for our political leaders – Brexit and its consequences.
None of the parties are willing to discuss Brexit, let alone the possibility of talking to the EU about the UK returning to a customs union and the single market – which many believe would provide the necessary boost, both in terms of confidence and exports – that might just lift growth here in the UK.
