Good morning and welcome to this week’s Friday Brief.
The Year of Engineering is a Government campaign, which launched this week to celebrate the world and wonder of UK engineering in 2018. The MTA and its members have thrown their support behind the campaign and sent a letter to the Prime Minister signed by our members, MACH 2018 exhibitors and MTA associates.
We like to say a big thank you to all these companies for recognising how vital it is that we attract new talent in to the engineering sector and by coming together we can amplify support for this excellent project. We’ll be doing more to support this campaign throughout the year so stay tuned.
Sticking with Government engagement the MTA will be writing a formal response to two of the Government’s current consultations, Implementation of T level programmes consultation and Institute for Apprenticeships: Occupational Maps consultation. This is an opportunity to help influence the future of technical education to ensure it suits the needs of our industry, and therefore your opinion is important to us. Please click here to find out more information on the T level.
Recent productivity data published by the ONS showed a strong improvement, both for the whole economy and for manufacturing - indeed it grew at the fastest rate for 6 years, although there is still some way to go before we can say that the “productivity puzzle” has been resolved. Data from Eurostat showed mixed messages with an increase in profitability in the Euro-zone at its highest since 2008, but recording a fall in the investment rate. The positive trends coming out of the US market continued towards the end of 2017 with manufacturing technology orders up by more than 9% and cutting tool demand above +8%.
The annual ECTA Conference is being held in Italy this year in the spectacular location of Stresa on Lake Maggiore. The hosts have put together an interesting agenda, including presentations on “a new manufacturing perspective for the European economy”, “from Industry 4.0 to Enterprise 4.0” and “electrification of the powertrain”, as well as a keynote lecture by a former leader of the Italian Air Force Display Team on “The beauty of an effective high-performance team”. More details of the programme and how to register are on their web-site at www.ecta-tools.org or you can contact MTA (e-mail Geoff Noon on gnoon@mta.org.uk)
University of Sheffield AMRC Training Centre apprentice, Oliver Marsh, has scooped a major industry apprenticeship award for his role in helping the UK’s largest manufacturer of wheelie bins reduce the cost of its production processes by more than £135,000 a year. Find out more in the story below.
MTA members TBAT Innovation kick off their first in a series of R&D Tax Credits events which will be touring the UK in the coming months, find out more in the story below.
Government has recently updated the consolidated list of strategic military and dual-use items that require export authorisation, see the full list in the story below.
That is all for this week, we’ll be back next Friday with more industry news, until then have a great weekend from everyone at the MTA.
