Nabarro’s Martin McKervey tells The Manufacturer that any national manufacturing strategy needs to review the UK government’s rigid interpretation of EU procurement rules.
These have tended to favour ‘best price’ bids rather than taking into account the full economic and social benefit to local supply chains for bids from domestic consortia.
“There is appetite to invest in UK infrastructure from overseas investors and a desire from the government to support major infrastructure projects,” says Mr McKervey. “However the public and private sectors need to work together to make sure that the correct economic conditions are in place and crucially investment needs to be focused not only on housing and transport but also energy and renewables too.
“This will mean we play to the strengths of manufacturers that, supported by the Advanced Manufacturing Research Centre and other centres in the High Value Manufacturing Catapult, have the quality and skills necessary to become world class suppliers to global infrastructure supply chains”.
The rankings of 20 countries by infrastructure investment metrics are given in the Nabarro Infrastructure Index, published June 2013.
