Corus' problems on Teesside reveal a lack of strategic thinking

Editor's commentary

The integrated steelworks on Teesside is being mothballed and everyone is sympathetic. But sympathy isn’t enough. You can put plants and equipment into mothballs but you can’t do the same with the people who work there. Livelihoods, careers and whole lives are disrupted and to think that could be neatly unpacked and resumed at some future point is not realistic. Maybe mothballing doesn’t mean closure, but for a lot of those affected, that’s in reality what it is: they won’t go back.

Teesside’s problem is that its customers walked away. Having bet the business on a limited number of long-term deals, the plant had nowhere to go when work suddenly proved short-term and then stopped. It’s not clear what other options there were.

And yet… There does appear to be a worrying lack of strategic thinking going on about businesses and industries in this country, and that applies to government as much as anyone.

Steelworkers will look at the apparent contrast between the treatment of the banks and the help available to a manufacturing business in trouble. And though you can argue that banks are essential to all business, some of the activities that got the financial sector into difficulty were a long way from that essential core.

The problem that applies to the whole of manufacturing industry, not just steel, in the UK is that when it comes to the crunch it’s not really regarded as essential to the economy. Steelworks suffer here because steel-using industries have contracted, bit by bit, plant by plant. There’s no national strategy that says that a particular sector or capability is the hallmark of a developed economy and has to be retained come what may. The strength of vested interests or other sectors in some countries – such as the German-owned car industry – stops this happening elsewhere. But we’ve yielded control over a lot of territory in manufacturing: we don’t have a strategy and nor is one being forced upon us by heavyweight interests. 

Teesside maybe brings these things into focus, but there are other reasons for asking how this might be changed coming up in the next couple of weeks. Next week in the UK is National Manufacturing Week; Science and Engineering Week follows hot on its heels. These kinds of event usually don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world but maybe this year, with the Teesside experience and an election in the offing, we can start asking the questions just a bit louder. Just where are we going?