David Edgerton rightly draws attention to the emphasis so often placed on startup companies in UK industrial policy – or at least in political gestures towards the manufacturing sector (The woes of startup Britishvolt should shock the UK out of its Brexit self-delusion, 11 November). Real success is no easy win, especially in turning acorns into productive oak trees.
For example, civil aerospace production, one of the UK’s major industrial successes, now supports several thousand jobs and reels in millions annually in foreign exchange. This achievement stands on the back of more than 75 years of largely public investment. For much of the time this was unprofitable. Up to 1974, the UK government had invested nearly £740m in civil aircraft for a return of less than £54m.
The breakthrough was a result of joining the Airbus consortium. Even then, success came only with the third member of the Airbus family, the A320. This has handsomely repaid government investment of £400m, with more than £1bn returned over 30 years. Returns from later Airbus types have been more modest, but the A320 rolls into its fifth decade with 9,000 sales to date. Scouring the archives on the Airbus saga reveals persistent Treasury opposition and sceptical politicians. The lesson is that turning innovation (in this case a brilliant wing design) into solid economic success requires patience.
Prof Keith Hayward
London
Re the sorry story of Britishvolt, it didn’t have to be like this. In 1977, I brought together a British/Danish team to work on new materials for advanced batteries. We were the first such multinational project to receive EU funding. As part of this, the new materials that made possible the lithium-ion battery were invented by Prof John Goodenough and his team at Oxford. He received the Nobel prize for this work in 2019.
I ensured a worldwide patent was taken out by my then employer, the UK Atomic Energy Authority at Harwell. Every battery later made by other companies provided licence and royalty income to the then privatised AEA Technology. This could have been used to create a world-leading advanced battery industry by now. The scientists were ready, but nothing happened. Unsurprisingly, AEA went into administration. Blame City short-termism, not government hot air.
Bruce Tofield
London
Dave Edgerton’s perceptive article highlights the failings of hi-tech boosterism expounded by successive Tory governments. Yet, to meet today’s challenges on climate change, the left needs to offer a new growth and innovation paradigm. To achieve this, we have to discard the baggage of the industrial era, with its blind defence of producer interests and a supply-side fixation on economically unproven technologies, such as carbon storage, or expensive and risky ones such as nuclear power.
Decarbonising the country’s 28m households requires technical innovations combined with new financial models to ensure the transformation is done affordably and at scale. Labour’s green deal has the potential to meet this challenge. But it needs to break from the top-down industrial model and recognise that the decentralised innovation model offers more broad-based regeneration, providing jobs across the country.
Jon Bloomfield
Birmingham