For sites that gained prominence during World War Two, it might be thought that Warton and Samlesbury would no longer play a significant role in the country today. But in fact BAE Systems’ twin facilities in Lancashire are as relevant to the local area now as they were in 1942, when Warton was built. They assemble the Eurofighter and Hawk jet trainer aircraft, and produce Britain’s substantial portion – around a tenth – of engineering and manufacturing work for the US F-35 Lightning programme.

David Holmes, the forthright director of Military Air and Information (MAI) manufacturing operations at the defence giant, doesn’t take kindly to the notion that engineering fell out of favour in the region: four generations of his family have been employed at the plant, and his son is working on additive layer manufacturing at BAE (see box on page 31). 

Holmes says: “Manufacturing and engineering never went out of vogue – either at BAE Systems or in the North West. It’s been the bedrock of what we do for more than 70 years, our differentiator, and our ticket to global partnerships. This isn’t a new thing. Thank goodness people have worked that out – rather than us swimming against the tide of convention.”

Both BAE sites, which employ thousands of engineers and manufacturing workers, also support a wider community of small firms. In 2013, BAE Systems MAI spent £1.98 billion with more than 1,700 supply-chain companies – including £116 million in Lancashire alone. 

Developing a local pool of talent, Holmes says, has been important to the firm for more than 20 years. It trains its own apprentices, and some apprentices for local small firms for the first year, as part of the Employer Ownership Scheme. Apprentice intake across BAE this year is more than 800, the biggest ever total – this includes 113 to be recruited in Lancashire next September. 

MAI in Lancashire is closely involved with the local academic community, including the University of Central Lancashire, based in Preston, the Lancaster University School of Management, and John Moores University in Liverpool. Its “pipeline of talent” strategy works with more than 20 schools in Lancashire. BAE tries to encourage students to take Stem subjects and sends ambassadors into primary and secondary schools.

Holmes says it is important that there is not “feast and famine” when it comes to injecting fresh blood into the business. Even when BAE in Lancashire carried out its biggest redundancy programme, when 3,000 jobs were lost in 1991, it continued to recruit apprentices, he points out. “This is a very large ecosystem of skills, knowledge and capability,” he says. “To be able to survive, we recognise that we need a strong base around us. It also allows the supply chain to invest in technologies and processes that we benefit from.

“We don’t want companies that are solely reliant on BAE Systems. We want them to be successful in their own right. It is a long-term proposition which we have been working on for 20 years in the North West.” The attrition level is 2.5% for the workforce. The notion that there is no such thing as a job for life in the region is erroneous, with nearby nuclear firm Westinghouse also able to provide lifelong engineering employment, says Holmes. 

BAE’s continued presence in the North West is important to the wider economy. Nationally, the company’s labour productivity – or gross value added per employee – is £105,000, or 2.46 times the national average, according to a report published three years ago by Oxford Economics. For every 10 jobs created by BAE Systems directly, another 12 jobs are supported in the supply chain. The effect helps to sustain quality of life in the local area. “Because we hire local, you start to influence the quality of place,” says Holmes. “You start to influence where there is an area of disposable income. 

“We are at the centre of this very large economic flywheel for the North West.”

It is a good time to be in the aerospace industry: order books for civil aircraft are full, driven by soaring demand for passenger planes in South East Asia. And the government has recently directed an unprecedented level of support at the industry, with the establishment of the £2 billion Aerospace Growth Partnership and initiatives such as the Rolls-Royce-led Sharing in Growth programme, available to suppliers looking to improve to win more business within the industry. 

David Bailey, chief executive of the North West Aerospace Alliance, says it now has 240 members and that there are 3,000 aerospace companies in the UK, contributing £27.8 billion to the economy. Companies involved in the alliance provide direct employment to 26,000 people. Average gross value added by employees in aerospace is £73,000, higher than general manufacturing and services, Bailey claims. As well as BAE, which is supported by local engineering firms machining titanium and other aerospace materials, Airbus is making wings for the A320, A380 and A350 passenger aircraft at nearby Broughton, across the border into North Wales. The alliance is also working with the Isle of Man Department of Economic Development, supporting a thriving aerospace cluster on the island. 

According to Bailey, the UK share of the global aerospace market stands at 17%. He says: “We’re moving through a transitional period where primes and tier ones are considering reshoring work back to the UK, which is interesting. I think the UK supply chain has to respond by innovating.

“Cost reductions overseas have been eroded. I would say one in four aerospace companies is reshoring activity.”

Programmes such as the F-35 jet fighter project and Eurofighter have sustained BAE’s defence aerospace operations in Britain. But it hasn’t been a matter of waiting for the work to arrive: BAE took technologies into US defence contractor Lockheed Martin in the late 1990s to help it win the Joint Strike Fighter bid. “They see us as collaborative, innovative – as problem solvers,” says Holmes. F-35 technology developed by BAE includes a technique for super-plastic forming diffusion bonding of titanium, to produce an asymmetric cellular structure for the nozzle bay door for the short take-off and vertical landing version of the aircraft. 

Machine tools used by BAE in the assembly process are now used across the Lockheed Martin team, as is technology developed originally for use in the production of Eurofighter Typhoon aircraft. “But we don’t have what I would call the ‘not invented here’ syndrome,” says Holmes. “If Lockheed Martin has an idea then we are happy to learn and share, and adopt it.”

At a local level, collaboration among engineering firms is becoming more important, explains Jeanette Carr, international trade manager at the North and Western Lancashire Chamber of Commerce, based in Preston. The chamber has established a manufacturers’ club, drawing in firms working in aerospace, automotive and healthcare. Carr says: “People had been locked down for a number of years. It has been a ‘survival of the fittest’ scenario. Don’t open your doors, don’t network. We became introverts.

“When the order books were full, manufacturers didn’t worry about that. But when the downturn came, they had to rethink things.”

She says businesses that have never previously done so are considering exporting. “We can show them how to do it. If you’ve never exported something, it is a big deal. There are a lot of loops to go through.” Local businesses are manufacturing head scarves for the Saudi Arabian market, and recycling drinks cans that are compacted into blocks, exported to India and China, and remelted to make aircraft panels. Rubber and materials recycling in the North West in general is booming, says Carr. “A lot of people look at BAE Systems and stop there, but there’s so much along the chain. But businesses here can be shy and retiring about talking about what they are doing.”

The chamber is encouraging larger firms to consider sourcing as many products as possible within Lancashire: BAE Systems has participated in buyers’ days in Blackpool with local suppliers, set up by the chamber. An American-owned firm is repairing all British improvised explosive device-damaged vehicles used in the war in Afghanistan in Leyland. Carr says the former mill town of Chorley is now part of the 14th wealthiest borough in the country. Manufacturing in Chorley has a long history. “There is a lightbulb moment taking place there now among engineering and manufacturing firms,” says Carr. Additive layer manufacturing firm Ultimaker, which is importing Dutch rapid prototyping technology into British schools, is one of a number of innovative engineering businesses based there. 

Steven Szostak, chief executive of Britain’s Energy Coast Cumbria (BECC), is based at Westlakes Science and Technology Park in Moor Row, near the Sellafield site. The park is incubating a range of businesses, including some serving the local nuclear industry. He says the industrial band that stretches from the west Cumbrian coast at Sellafield down to Barrow, where BAE Systems makes nuclear submarines, contains a range of brands not normally associated with the county. 

“We’re perceived by many outsiders to be about farming, the Lake District, and tourism,” he says. But companies in the region include National Nuclear Laboratories, speciality film-maker Innovia Films, McVitie’s, tyre maker Pirelli and sports shoe maker New Balance. 

Meanwhile, the future of the 250 workers employed by Tata Steel at an engineering centre in Workington, Cumbria, is of concern after the Indian-owned firm decided to sell its long products business late last year to Swiss firm Klesch. Tata Steel also employs a small number of workers in Penrith. Glaxo Operations UK, a major manufacturing site run by GlaxoSmithKline, is based in Ulverston.

“We are an industrial zone,” says Szostak, “and we’ve been making stuff for a long time. If we were part of any major conurbation – Yorkshire, Humberside, Manchester – people would know about it. There is something unusual about west Cumbria. We are a long way away, and perhaps out of people’s sight and minds. But we are a hidden gem.”

Although Cumbria has a history of mining, steel making and manufacturing, and is set to benefit from the decision by the government to press ahead with plans by the Toshiba-owned NuGen consortium to build a new generation of nuclear reactors close to Sellafield, there are pockets of poverty and deprivation in the area. “Thousands of people would have lost their jobs if Sellafield had shut down, as was threatened some years ago,” Szostak points out. “In a conurbation, that’s bad news. But when you’re 60 to 100 miles from anywhere else, it’s potentially disastrous.”

Successive governments and development agencies have recognised the possible consequences for local people and tried to ensure that industry in the area remains viable, he adds. Money is also being siphoned from the nuclear industry into projects that benefit the local community more widely, such as developing the port at Workington. Some 30 community development projects in the area have also been funded by the industry. 

“We are not apologising for nuclear, like we used to do. These days, all parties are behind it,” says Szostak. “But we are trying to avoid all our eggs being in one basket. That is why we use the term ‘low-carbon energy’ here, because it includes renewables. Any government is clear that Cumbria delivers a significant part of its national agenda for nuclear.

“But our job is to grow industry and look at other opportunities, using the theme of energy.” The aim is to ensure that large firms use local suppliers when they can – but those firms are not big enough to serve all the needs of OEMs and tier ones, and so their capacity needs to be developed, says Szostak. This challenge needs to be embraced by central and local government and the local enterprise partnerships.

Smaller nuclear firms from west Cumbria are winning work in the export market, says Szostak. For example, they have participated in trade missions to Japan and picked up work in the clean-up in the wake of the Fukushima disaster. Meanwhile local businesses have been assured that while the Westinghouse AP1000 reactors that are to be built at Moorside by NuGen will be US-designed and Japanese-owned, they will be built by local engineers and construction workers. 

BECC is also interested in the potential of tidal energy to rejuvenate Cumbria. There is the possibility of developing a tidal energy scheme off the west Cumbrian coast, inspired by the potential development of a tidal energy lagoon in Swansea Bay. “The idea is finding a groundswell of support here,” says Szostak.

He says transport infrastructure in the area is appalling. “We have a big infrastructure problem. It is restricted and old-fashioned.” Rail infrastructure has been “eroded”. 

Other forms of energy infrastructure are also on BECC’s radar. Fortuitously, says Szostak, one of the prime locations for potential exploitation of geothermal heating is Westlakes Science and Technology Park itself. “We will probably experiment with it ourselves,” he says. 

“Our job ultimately is to turn heads, and get money flowing into Cumbria – not just government money, but proper private sector investment.” 

Advanced methods simplify manufacturing

Additive layer manufacturing (ALM) is viewed as critical to the future of Warton and Samlesbury. BAE has been using stereolithography to produce parts for 20 years. Recently, fused deposition modelling has been used to make plastic parts for the power take-off shaft of the Tornado aircraft. BAE has also previously made aircraft alarm bell housings for the veteran VC10 aircraft using ALM. 

The technology has matured in recent years. Tim Lee, head of engineering capability for BAE’s defence information, training and services business, says: “The notion that you can’t put plastic parts into an aircraft is untrue. You need to consider the environment into which you are putting them, and whether you have a material for it that can be used in the additive manufacturing process.” Benefits include reductions in waste materials, energy consumption and weight and, above all, increased manufacturing simplicity. “For example, we can substitute 11 fabrication activities down to two. As a manufacturing process, it doesn’t get much better than that.”

Using ALM can protect BAE from erosion of traditional engineering skills, he says. “You get people who are particularly skilled at welding very complex parts. This helps to protect us if that person is no longer available. We like to keep it simple,” says Lee. “BAE is still a highly skilled place to work. But we want to be able to produce these parts with confidence.”

The Eurofighter wasn’t designed with ALM in mind. “When the VC10 was flying, it was Star Trek technology.” But the fundamentals of aerospace engineering remain the same as when the VC10 was designed – balancing thrust, drag, lift, mass, says Lee. “You are continually playing with those four elements.

“What does ALM give you? Potentially it gives you greater functionality for lower mass, and the potential to carry heavier payloads and weapons, or carry existing payloads further. 

“For an existing aircraft we can reduce its mass, and improve performance – such as the ability to climb or dive more quickly. 

“The less mass, the less fuel burnt.”

Working with universities keeps technology up to date

Brothers Neil and Mark Burns have been running Warrington’s Croft Filters for almost 30 years, where they specialise in the manufacture of customer-specified filters. Filters designed and made on site include cones, cylinders, baskets and screens, in materials including wire mesh and perforated plate. 

Orders range from one-off designs – in the week of PE’s visit Croft was shipping a one-off, bespoke design to a customer in the Ascension Islands – to large runs for international customers. The company has benefited from grants from Innovate UK, and Neil Burns has travelled to China to win new business. Sectors served by Croft include chemicals, oil and gas, pharmaceuticals, power generation, food and beverages, and aerospace.

Although the business is in some ways a traditional small manufacturing firm, Neil Burns is a keen adopter of new technology and has long been using search engine optimisation techniques to drum up new business over the web. The Burns brothers are also keen on the latest manufacturing techniques and have invested extensively in ALM, which is being used more and more frequently by Croft to produce finished parts for customers.

The company’s most recent investment was a new Nd:YAG laser welding machine. Croft will use the technology to join filter components that have smaller seams or low thermal distortion, and therefore require a higher welding speed and precise control during the process.

Neil Burns says working with universities is crucial to Croft’s ability to develop new technologies and manufacturing processes. “They also appreciate the value of working with us. And we’re sexier because of our use of ALM,” he says.

Croft is engaged in Lancaster University’s China Catalyst programme. “We are trying to get involved in collaborative R&D with China. We think we have a lot to offer. It’s not clear what China has to offer back to us. We are persisting with it but we do not know what the outcome will be.” 

The loss of intellectual property to the Chinese is a concern, he admits. “They are going to get there, one way or the other. But we are not keen on giving stuff away.”