Good morning and welcome to this week’s Friday brief.
It has been a good week for investing in industry. Yesterday saw the Prime Minister and the Chancellor in Leeds to announce £17.5 million worth of funding in the City Region. The money is earmarked to be awarded to business to improve skills in the regions manufacturing, construction, digital, hospitality and medical technology sectors. The bid was championed by MTA President Mark Ridgway OBE, who sits on LEP Board.
Lloyds Bank Commercial Banking has also announced that they will continue to invest £1billion a year into the UK manufacturing sector until 2017. And finally Business Secretary Vince Cable announced Government plans to invest the latest £100 million tranche of support UK’s aerospace industry under the sector’s industrial strategy.
The Department for Business, Innovation and Skills is interested in gaining a clearer understanding of payment practices across different sectors. To capture the automotive sector's practices, BIS have put together the survey which we’d encourage you to fill out.
We’d also like to draw your attention to the MTA Business Survey for January. It will only take a few minutes to fill in and is a vital resource to aid us in the work we do here at the MTA, so please take this opportunity to fill it out.
You can download the latest information about the application of the Ecodesign Directive to Machine Tools this week. It’s a huge issue for the sector affecting the long-term sustainability and global competitiveness of the European machine tool industry. CECIMO has been working on a set of Self-Regulation Measures for several years, more below.
In Economic news PMI (Purchasing Managers Index) reports for manufacturing from around the world. The news is generally good with the UK and the euro-zone picking up slightly, although inevitably there is some variation in performance across the euro-zone. Elsewhere in the world there are mostly good news stories, although one or two countries had poor months - perhaps the most notable were Turkey (which slipped into negative territory) and both India and Canada, which were much less positive than they had been in.
Thanks for reading and we’ll be back next Friday with more industry news.
From everyone at the MTA we hope you enjoy your weekend.