Why Sunderland and Stoke are the tomorrow’s world of the UK economy. By Julian Glover, The Guardian.
At some point in the 1970s I had a Ladybird book illustrating the cars of the future: a happy British family was shown racing along an empty road in an all-electric car with Ford Cortina styling; a device at service stations swapped empty batteries for charged ones. This all looked convincing. Only it didn’t happen. Electric cars remain tomorrow’s invention: like low-carbon jobs and tilting our economy back from finance to manufacturing, they are easier to dream about than achieve.
Or so I thought until last week, when I drove a real electric car along real roads in an English city that will soon be making them from Welsh steel. Nissan was lured to Sunderland in the 80s by Conservative politicians and encouraged to go electric more recently by Labour ones. The company’s Leaf car was engineered in Japan and is currently made there, but soon 50,000 a year will be made on Wearside. Already a new battery plant has been built and a training college is under construction by the factory gates to educate mechanics in the mysteries of the lithium-ion future.
This car works: fast enough for my Nissan guide to frown as I gunned it past Newcastle’s speed cameras. Apart from the silence and limited range – 110 miles on a £2 charge – you wouldn’t know it was anything other than a standard shiny, slightly bling family car. Driving it from the factory I felt less gloomy than usual about Britain’s chances of paying its way in the world. Manufacturing – as the BBC’s Evan Davis says in his new book and TV series – still matters.
The Sunderland plant is eye-opening for a columnist who has never seen a 500-tonne press stamp out car doors faster than a cook can cut pastry. It makes a car every 30 seconds at full tilt, sending most of them abroad. These undistinguished low-slung white sheds account for 1.4% of Britain’s manufactured exports; 4,900 people work in the factory, which, says Nissan, supports 13,500 more jobs across the country.
I’d expected a place where Britishness had been subordinated: but this is more than an assembly plant following instructions sent from Tokyo. It feels part of the north-east. There is noise, pop music playing, a smell of oil and drying paint, sparks – and ironic cheers as the production line kicked back into life after a 30-minute lunch break.
The scale is astonishing, too: the twin production lines run for miles. Dashboards are wheeled across on robot trolleys; seats descend from the ceiling; car bodies plunge into baths of grey undercoat and are brushed by giant wheels of ostrich feathers as they dry; a petrol pump slides along and engines start for the first time with a puff of blue smoke, roaring to 110kmh on a test rig. It’s oddly endearing to watch a newborn car come to life: like a baby’s first gurgle.
Better still would be an electric car; but not yet. Even so, the British car industry is more than clinging on. This month Nissan confirmed that Britain would design, engineer and make a new model: a £192m investment that did not need state aid. Nor is this a happy exception. With some trumpeting from Downing Street and a lot of help from the last government (motor people are fans of the former business secretary Lord Mandelson), BMW has just invested £500m in the Mini. Jaguar Land Rover has reversed a decision to close one of its plants. Something, even, is stirring at Chinese-owned Longbridge, which Wen Jiabao visited on Sunday before coming to London to call for more trade and less talk of human rights.
Less overtly, other parts of the car industry are beginning to do the same. A cheap pound has meant two good years for British exporters of all sorts, most far smaller and more specialised than Nissan’s plant. Manufacturing accounts for 12% of GDP, more than financial services, and manufacturing output is up 1.3% on a year ago (though growth has stalled). But future growth will come from sales to markets beyond the stagnant EU: and some in the motor industry are beginning to argue Europe is not the best place from which to achieve that. Growing markets want car plants of their own.
Manufacturing is more than the nostalgic buy-British metal-bashing romance of old. But there’s cause for anxiety. This month, for instance, the latest big order for London’s commuter trains went to a German company that will make most parts of them abroad, rather than the Canadian one that owns Britain’s last real train factory in Derby.
There’s a danger, I suppose, of fetishising manufacturing – just as, not long ago, the government fell in love with big finance. The argument that an economy that doesn’t actually make things you can touch isn’t a real economy is, of course, naive. And even Nissan finds it hard to persuade school-leavers to become apprentices rather than hairdressers. Working in a factory is hard, mostly poorly paid, and robotic. On top of that, companies that compete only on cost won’t survive, however much the state cherishes them.
But the alternative is worse: writing off industries on the grounds that defending them from cheap imports is hardly worth the bother.
This is what happened in Stoke-on-Trent, where the ceramics industry has imploded and now employs only 7,000 people in the city – or 1,500 fewer than depend on jobseeker’s allowance. It’s now obvious that this collapse was unnecessary, or at least way too big. The firms that remain – such as Steelite and Portmeirion – are expanding and some production being brought back from Asia. Japanese collectors do not want their Wedgewood made in Indonesia. Emma Bridgewater’s cosy creamware has brought a factory back to life: a million miles from Nissan, it feels part National Trust, with an Aga in the kitchen and good coffee, and part Stoke as it once was and still could be.
In his book of watercolour illustrations, The Lost City of Stoke-on-Trent, Emma Bridgewater’s husband, Matthew Rice, records the city’s fall. State-sponsored redevelopment flattened Stoke’s Victorian past, but never really came up with a viable present or future. Billions have been wasted, a fraction of which might have modernised ceramics as the state encouraged Nissan. At an evening meeting at the Bridgewater factory this month, I heard Stoke’s civic leaders defend the idea that their city should make things against well-meant advice that everyone should commute on the fast train to Manchester.
David Cameron has at least travelled to Stoke, to launch a new enterprise scheme – incredibly the first prime minister to visit in over 30 years. But the old problems remain: especially the banks’ unwillingness to lend. It seems odd that small firms are left hoping for support from Handelsbanken, a Swedish bank that, unlike state-owned British ones, is willing to trust its branches to lend to small firms in the north and Midlands.
My Ladybird book may have been childish, but was it unrealistic to think there’s a tomorrow’s world to get enthusiastic about? Our problem isn’t a lack of skills, enterprise or technical cleverness: Nissan’s British plant is one of its most efficient anywhere. Rather, we remain unconvinced that we can make a go of making things. The evidence says otherwise, but we do not choose to believe it.
The High Court has ruled that assets held by the Wedgwood Museum in Stoke-on-Trent can be sold in order to fill financial gaps in the Wedgwood Group Pension Plan. There are some 7500 members of the pension plan, of which 3500 are currently receiving a pension.
