This week we’ve had some great news from Clarks with 80 jobs being created in Street as they bring shoe manufacturing back to the UK. Any job creation is to be welcomed but this is particularly pleasing after a series of job cuts over recent years as Clarks has restructured and adapted to a changing market.
The weaker Pound will obviously have been a factor in Clarks’s decision but I think it might also reveal a change in mindset for manufacturers in all sectors as production lines become increasingly automated. Where previously the imperative for manufacturers was to find the part of the world where labour was cheapest, they must now return to the parts of the world where a labour force is available with the skills required not to manufacture but to maintain and operate the ultra modern machinery that now does the making.
For too long, Somerset has been a low skill, low wage economy with productivity lagging behind our near neighbours. With Hinkley and its supply chain, Charlie Bingham and now Clarks bringing new and well paid jobs to our local economy, it seems we are turning a corner. Our new industrial strategy should reinforce that success, building on our pedigree in food and drink manufacturing, footwear and leatherwork, Agritech, defence and aerospace, tourism and energy.
Through that strategy we should be actively seeking inwards investment from those sectors, providing the infrastructure and development sites appropriate to their needs, and delivering a skilled workforce at ease with the exponential advances in manufacturing technology. A shrinking working age population as a proportion of the population as a whole needn’t spell economic doom if we can re-gear to become the highly skilled productive workforce modern industry requires.