Good Morning and welcome to this week’s Friday Brief.
Wednesday saw the Chancellor deliver a comprehensive spending review. The headlines were U-turns over tax credit and cuts to the police budget but there was plenty for business to chew over too. You can read Paul O’Donnell’s summary below.
The MACH 2016 visitor registration page is now live on www.machexhibition.com , so it is time to start targeting your customer base and directing them towards the MACH 2016 website to register. More details on the benefits of early registration can be found in the story below.
We’d like to say a big congratulations to MTA members Joseph Rhodes won silver at this year’s EEF/Aldermore Future Manufacturing Awards and to Ecotile and Mollart Engineering who were both nominated for awards at last nights The TMMX Awards at the ICC in Birmingham.
Two new manufacturing research hubs, designed to tackle some of the long-term challenges facing industry, are being established with £20m funding from the EPSRC. The hubs, which will be based at Southampton and Brunel Universities, will also be backed by an additional £58m from industry.
The AMRC has become one of 11 European partners that have formed an alliance to collaborate on a new project, Twin-Control. The project aims to design a new concept for machine tool and machining process simulation, find out more details on this exciting project within the Brief.
Staying with the Catapult centres a brand new state-of-the-art training centre, set to create a new generation of engineers and narrow the UK’s manufacturing skills-gap, has been formally opened by the Business Secretary, Sajid Javid.
The MTC’s Lloyds Bank Advanced Manufacturing Training Centre, located on the campus of the Manufacturing Technology Centre (MTC) at Ansty Park, Coventry, has been designed to provide premium training for the next generation of engineers and technicians.
The latest data on the UK economy from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) showed no changes to the first estimates issued last month, with the UK economy growing by +0.5% quarter-on-quarter and by +2.3% compared to a year ago. The ONS also released the preliminary figures for business investment which showed that the recent growth trend is continuing as it was up by +2.2% on the quarter and was +6.6% higher than a year ago; we have to wait until next month for the detailed industry level data, but figures for spending by type of asset suggest that investment in plant & machinery is sharing in this positive trend.
That’s all for this week, we’ll be back next Friday with more industry news.