Only enter text, no images or linksWelcome to Friday Brief, covering the week ending 24th October 2014.
We start this week with the sad news of the passing of Howard Ormerod Barret, the former Director General of the MTA. Our condolences to his family from everyone at the MTA.
Yesterday saw the latest MTA Economic Forecast event at Iscar Tools in Birmingham, was attended by nearly 100 members. They heard from two of Oxford Economics’ leading voices, Chairman John Walker and UK Industry Lead Jeremy Leonard, with the forecast itself delivered by the MTA’s own Statistician Geoff Noon. An overview of the presentations can be found below.
In other economic news today we have GDP data which shows a slight slowdown in the pace of growth, but the figures are broadly what was expected by most analysts and the annualised growth rate of +3.0% is above the long-run rate for the UK. The BBC web-site report on the numbers tried to be alarmist about the slight slowing in growth - +0.7% compared to +0.9% in the 2nd quarter – but we really cannot see how this is a matter for concern as the UK is still the fastest growing of the developed world economies and the Q2 pace was probably unsustainable anyway.
We also have some interesting info from the Bank of England’s agents who have a special report on investment intentions this month, although this is across the whole economy (not just for manufacturing).
We have news from MTA Member Siemens, who have launched a partnership with leading qualification body OCR, designed to tackle the skills gap in engineering and manufacturing. The programme will focus on the development of joint education resources for 14-16 year olds, and a curriculum for schools designed to increase the skills of the future generation of engineers.
In our industry events round-up this week we have The National Physical Laboratory (NPL) holding a workshop on Traceable In-Process Dimensional Measurement in Teddington on November 5th. Two speakers from our Technical Committee will be speaking at the event - Dr John Liverton (Mazak - TC Chairman) and Dr Andrew Longstaff (Huddersfield University)
Also, UK Trade & Investment will be holding its 6th Export Week during the week of 10th -14th November - across the week there will be a varied series of events all over the UK, aimed at businesses to either start their export journey or increase their international business.
If you have any news you would like to share with MTA members please email Ollie on olawson@mta.com or give us a ring on 020 7298 6400. Have a good weekend.