BPF News

The British Plastics Federation and eight other trade associations have welcomed the Government's Strategy for Manufacturing and together have made a robust response to it.

These are summaries of some of the points made in letters to Patricia Hewitt MP, the Secretary of State for Trade and Industry and to Martin O’Neill, Chairman of the Trade and Industry Select Committee:

• The Government has made a gloomy assessment of UK manufacturing and has played down the enormous effort made by our manufacturing industry to sharpen competitiveness.
• We agree that government resources should be given to best practice programmes, but emphasise that these must not be foisted upon sectors with little consultation.
• We agree that macroeconomic stability is essential for sustained growth; increased interest rates because of house price inflation would damage UK manufacturing at a very difficult time.
• We are surprised that the Strategy makes no mention of the serious impact on competitiveness made by the Climate Change Levy or the forthcoming increase in Employers NICs.
• We welcome government plans to identify the regulatory concerns of manufacturers and are keen to assist in this process.
• We would urge for more commitment to de-regulate as industry is currently hamstrung to an unacceptable level.
• We are disappointed that the Strategy does not analyse the 60 per cent of UK exports æ which is all manufacturing æ and look for areas of growth that could be supported by government.
• We suggest the government should analyse what manufacturing is moving overseas, to where and why? The Strategy should then make proposals to seek to prevent this.
• We welcome the proposal to appoint business people to DTI boards and we propose a DTI Manufacturing Board made up of CEO’s from large and small manufacturing businesses, trade unions, HM Treasury and DEFRA.
• We strongly believe that government should make greater use of industry organisations such as ours, as advisory bodies and channels of support.

If you would like more information about this, contact Sarah Kelly, BPF, tel no 020 7457 5000 or email: skelly@bpf.co.uk

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