Welsh Government dragging its feet over manufacturing strategy

5 February 2010 Wales’s manufacturing sector needs clear direction on how the Welsh Government is going to use its resources in future according to a new report from the Enterprise and Learning Committee of the National Assembly for Wales.

The Committee is concerned that the Welsh Government still hasn’t published its strategy for reviving the struggling sector despite the Minister for the Economy and Transport receiving the draft in October 2008.

Since then the recession and cheaper manufacturing costs overseas have seen companies such as Bosch, Hoover, Indesit and Anglesey Aluminium each shed hundreds of jobs over the past year.

The Committee heard evidence from CBI Cymru/Wales and NESTA on the future of manufacturing in Wales, and recommended a move towards more sustainable, higher value and lower carbon manufacturing industries in future, rather than propping up ageing industries for short-term fixes.

Chair of the Committee, Gareth Jones AM, said: The Committee understands the Welsh Government’s view that the changing economic climate has made planning any sort of strategy for the manufacturing industry difficult.

Yet almost a fifth of Wales’s GDP is raised from manufacturing. The sector therefore needs a clear sign from the Welsh Government on how it will help create and sustain the environment in which manufacturing in Wales can develop, innovate and grow.

That means ensuring the sector has the skills, energy, transport and access to funding it requires. More than that, we need to see a strategy that establishes a long-term commitment to creating sustainable markets, in which companies can have the confidence to invest.”

Among the Committee’s ten recommendations are:

• An assurance from the Welsh Government that Wales’s major manufacturers will play a central role in shaping policy in the future.

• The Welsh Government should be at the forefront of developing the ‘green manufacturing’ sector and making the green economy mainstream rather than additional to its wider economic policy.

• A focus on quality rather than quantity with encouragement for firms with high growth potential as opposed to high numbers of start-ups.

• The manufacturing strategy to be based on the development of sustainable energy solutions in order to keep Welsh manufacturers competitive in the long term.

• Targets aimed at decreasing the proportion of manufactured products transported by road by encouraging greater use of rail freight.