The chairman of Oxfordshire's Local Enterprise Partnership (LEP) believes the county's manufacturing industry is in excellent shape, despite new figures that show 10,600 jobs have been lost in the past four years.
The numbers come from a new report by the GMB union, which found that Oxfordshire had seen more manufacturing jobs disappear since 2006 than any other county in the South East, apart from Hampshire and Kent. Recent job cuts include the loss of 300 posts at computer systems and classroom equipment manufacturer RM Education, based near Didcot.
The union blamed the job losses on recession and a stalled economic recovery, and regional secretary Richard Ascough said: “Unless action is taken to support and develop manufacturing the economic future for this nation is bleak. Only the British state has enough strength and power to halt and reverse the decline. This strength and power must be mobilised without delay to increase support for medium-sized companies in the UK, and new ways to encourage small firms to grow so they can employ more people and supply big industry.
“Urgent action also needs to be taken to deal with the skills shortages plague the UK. There should be a concentration of effort on high skill, high value manufacturing sectors - for example in the field of environmental technology - on those British companies most likely to succeed in the face of global competition.”
But Martin Dare-Edwards, UK manager of Abingdon-based manufacturer Infineum, said manufacturing in the county was not in as bad a state as portrayed. Mr Dare-Edwards, who was appointed chairman of Oxfordshire's new LEP in December 2010, said it was important to look at different types of manufacturing.
“Oxfordshire is performing excellently in the right type of manufacturing, what we need to do is differentiate between the products," he said. "These GMB figures relate to the manufacture of relatively low tech commodity products and it is true that those jobs have gone to places in the world where there is a lower wage and prices can therefore be undercut. The UK shouldn’t be trying to compete.
"We are, instead, showing an increase in Oxfordshire of high value added technology and design based products which need specific skills and allow for significantly higher wages.”
Recent manufacturing successes include BMW's decision to invest heavily in its Mini plant in East Oxford. But Samantha Barker, regional development manager for the Federation of Small Businesses in the Thames Valley, said: “Our recent Voice of Small Business Index showed that in Quarter 4, the balance of businesses reporting falling revenues rose to the highest level since the first half of 2010.
"With the recent slump in GDP driven partly by a 0.9 per cent fall in manufacturing, it is essential that the Government acts on policies and initiatives already announced, to help small businesses invest and grow.”
