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Car Manufacturing

I am grateful for that intervention, because the hon. Gentleman makes a good point, but our flexibility is a huge selling point for retaining our existing manufacturing industry, as is the attractiveness of the UK as a destination for manufacturers. I shall talk about that later. Let us look at the success side. During the past decade, Japanese car giants have invested £5 billion in the UK, and created 10,000 jobs. The hon. Member for Middlesbrough, South and East Cleveland (Dr. Kumar) gave a delightful description of the stunning success of Nissan's car plant. BMW now employs 55,000 people in the UK, following the Mini's tremendous success, with 200,000 cars built at Cowley last year, as the right hon. Member for Oxford, East (Mr. Smith) said. The United Kingdom builds more cars today than ever before—1.8 million last year, 74 per cent. of which were exported.