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UK Manufacturing

I welcome a great deal of what my right hon. Friend the Minister for Business, Innovation and Skills said in introducing the debate. If the hon. Member for Weston-super-Mare (John Penrose) will forgive me, I do not think I will be using his recipes in relation to manufacturing. Those of us who come from the west midlands know how badly the manufacturing sector is being hit by the current economic downturn. The West Midlands Committee is conducting an inquiry and will report in the near future, so I shall not prefigure that. In the short time available, I shall make a few comments about the automotive sector, both because my constituency includes Longbridge and as Chair of the all-party motor group. I shall not go over the issues about MG Rover that were discussed this week and will be spoken about again in great detail, save to say that, with all the accusations and counter-accusations that have been flying around over the past few days, I hope nobody loses sight of the fact that the important people in the debate are the 6,000 workers who lost their jobs, and their families, the communities that rely on them, and the suppliers to that plant. I hope that when he winds up the debate, my right hon. Friend will confirm that it is the Government's intention to publish the inquiry report into MG Rover as soon as possible, and that after four years of waiting those employees will be able to get the money that is their due from the trust fund that has been set up. On broader automotive issues, I welcome the fact that the signs coming out of the introduction of the scrappage scheme are positive. Perhaps there are lessons that we can learn from that for the future. Will my right hon. Friend bear in mind what my hon. Friend the Member for Stroud (Mr. Drew) said about short-time working subsidies, which still have a role to play? We need to look at those more seriously. I welcome the automotive assistance programme that was published in February, but like others I want to underline the fact that that programme is not yet working quickly enough. That must be addressed. For companies of strategic significance in the west midlands economy, it is particularly important that things move more speedily in order to attract the necessary investment. One example is Jaguar Land Rover, where the issue is loan guarantees on commercial rates. That must be brought to a conclusion as soon as possible so that that company can realise its undoubted potential. That brings me to the main issue that I want to cover today—risk. Assessing, managing and taking risk is at the heart of any business. Businesses cannot operate without risk. That is clear from the example of the automotive industry, where there is a risk every time millions of pounds are invested in developing a new product, research and development and so on. It was even clearer this week when motor sport industry representatives came to Parliament to talk about its potential—some hon. Members might have seen the industry's exhibitions. It is involved in a range of areas—from green technologies to defence equipment—that go well beyond motorsport, and at the root of that involvement is the industry's ability and willingness to take risk. At a time of economic downturn, there is a greater consensus about the need for the Government to intervene to nurture manufacturing. That is what the automotive assistance programme is all about, but, if we are to do so when bank credit is difficult to obtain, we must start taking responsible risks. The problem is that the machinery of government—for all the right reasons of looking after taxpayers' money and so on—can end up being too risk-averse, and the resultant delays can get in the way of what we want to do. When bank credit dries up, the Government rightly say, "We need to ensure that the European Investment Bank can put money in," but the European Investment Bank then looks for guarantees. It looks to the Government to back up those guarantees with their own loan guarantees, so the Government go back to the company to try to secure the guarantees that the firm could not provide in the first place. The danger is that we get into that big circle and we do not get very far. We, as politicians, must learn some lessons from that, because we often create that state of mind. When someone takes a risk, sometimes things will be successful and sometimes things will be unsuccessful, but when something is unsuccessful we politicians have a habit of immediately looking for heads to roll and for somebody to blame and of saying, "You should never have taken that risk in the first place." We had an example of that earlier this week, when the right hon. and learned Member for Rushcliffe (Mr. Clarke) went back to the MG Rover story and said that, in 2005, at that crucial time, it was absolutely wrong for the Government to invest—to risk—£6 million to try to save 6,000 jobs. Interestingly, the Tories supported the measure at the time, but they attack it now. Political amnesia is an interesting thing. The point is that it was justifiable to risk that money to save those jobs. It was the right thing to do, but it did not achieve the right result. We need to learn some lessons from that, but I certainly hope that they do not lead us to say, "Never take the risk", or to just play the blame game.