The Chemical Industries Association has just released the results of a survey in which it found that a staggering 87 per cent of business leaders in the chemical and pharmaceutical sectors feel that politicians do not understand the significance of manufacture.
This is an amazing statistic and gives major cause for concern. It wasn’t just the politicians that were seen to be ignorant of industry’s needs - both the banks and the education system were seen to be “failing the manufacturing sector”.
Steve Elliott, Chief Executive of the CIA, had some strong words to say on the subject, commenting that although politicians speak about rebalancing the economy and creating ‘green’ jobs in manufacturing, there is a lack of a convincing strategy for making the UK an attractive place to manufacture.
Communication is key
My concern is that maybe, as I discussed in my Editor’s page last month, the chemical and pharmaceutical sectors are failing to get their message across. The UK can only be “an attractive place to manufacture” if politicians are aware of industry’s needs. This also applies in communicating its requirements to the banking sector. Equally worrying is the perception that the education system is failing the manufacturing sector. There have been many programmes over the past 20 years or more aimed at encouraging schoolchildren and students to take a strong interest in chemistry and make their careers in science and engineering. Have these initiatives failed too?
Achieving industry goals
I see that in the USA, SOCMA has welcomed the EPA’s principles on chemicals management reform, but that it has expressed concern about how the proposed safety standard will be implemented. However, SOCMA stated that it “applauds the agency for focusing on improving the existing framework and resisting attempts by industry critics to adopt the monolithic European approach known as REACH”.
So it seems, therefore, that the communication problem is an international one, even if SOCMA succeeded in avoiding the adoption of a REACH-like system in the USA. Is it that politicians, government agencies, financial institutions and educational bodies aren’t listening to industry? Maybe it’s industry that needs to look at how it is trying to express its opinions and how it can get its message across more effectively!
