On Monday next week (October 30, 2017), CEO of Siemens UK, Jurgen Maier will unveil industry's detailed demands for what manufacturers want from a new UK industrial strategy.
Since the government published its Industrial Strategy consultation last February, Juergen Maier has led a team of industrialists and academics in researching the potential impact of UK manufacturers embracing wholesale the new digital technologies driving the Fourth Industrial Revolution – and what will happen if they don’t.
He is expected to say that there needs to be a root and branch reorganisation of government support systems for industry, which he says are currently patchy, so that small to medium sized companies, the backbone of UK manufacturing, can become globally competitive. He will call for extra government investment in ‘the order of hundreds of millions of pounds’.
Maier says success in driving this strategic revolution will provide the UK economy with new jobs and prosperity. Failure will mean jobs will be lost and the economy will never recover.
Above all, Maier believes UK manufacturing needs to recover the mojo that it enjoyed in its heyday decades ago, when it was seen as the engine room of the nation’s prosperity. He says those days can come again, but only if manufacturers embrace the future – and the government plays its part in supporting them.
