What do we mean by manufacturing?

I tend to see manufacturing, as distinct from making, where there is an element of mass production and/or mechanisation. 

In historic terms, we see manufacturing appearing when textiles were produced in a manufactory such as a mill driven by water power, instead of the cottage.  Birmingham gunsmiths offer a different example with the manufacturing process split down into constituent parts with each carried out by a different person, often in a different workshop. We can see how the production line developed from this.

A related question is which pairs of hands are manufacturing and which are providing a related service. The Office of National Statistics, I think, stumbled across this issue when comparing manufacturing employment over the post war period where they saw services being outsourced and so the related employees no longer being included in the returns made by manufacturing companies. This links to an example I found on a manufacturing blog in which manufacturing companies are placed in the spotlight. I was surprised to find a component distributor included and was told that it was part of the supply chain.

There are then questions of ownership and geography. Rolls-Royce and JCB are British manufacturing companies which manufacture both in the UK and elsewhere. Nissan is a Japanese company which manufactures in many countries including Britain; the same is true of the growing number of electric vehicle related companies building manufacturing plant in Britain. Some toy manufacturers, for example, who used to manufacture in the UK now have their products made in China Are they all British manufacturers? 

What about Manufacturers and makers? This image from the Bovey Tracy Craft Fair shows a few of the two hundred stands where makers sell the pieces they have made. This is a vibrant part of the economy and can lead to manufacturing.

I have friends who design and make table wear. If a particular design attracts great interest they may ask 'manufacturing' businesses to make them. They are no longer hand made, but who is the manufacturer? An article in Monocle magazine tells of the revival in Stoke’s pottery manufacturers. Another friend told me of Somerset textile factories which are more and more undertaking contract work for makers. 

Are they all part of the bigger manufacturing picture ?

The British electronics company ARM came out of Acorn computers where it designed operating systems. These then have to be printed on silicon chips. Are both parts manufacturing? ARM decided to licence its designs for other companies to process  is it still a manufacturer? A comparison is with EMI which designed the brain scanner. They had a choice of whether to make it themselves or license the design for others to make. They chose the first route only to find themselves unable to meet demand..

You can read my take on How Britain Shaped the Manufacturing World  

  

Whatever Happened to British Manufacturing

How often do we hear the lament that British manufacturing is in decline, that jobs have gone overseas? Great Britain was the workshop of the world. What has happened? In the companion volume, How Britain Shaped the Manufacturing World, the bold assertion in the book’s title was tested and not found wanting. In Whatever Happened to British Manufacturing, the story since the Festival of Britain of 1951 is explored: the good, the bad and the ugly.

There is much to celebrate in those brands of which this nation was rightly proud; the book takes a trip down memory lane. The stories of what happened to those brands we loved so much are uncovered . Importantly, the assumption of decline is challenged with examples of where Britain still holds its head high in the manufacturing world. It is not a story of gloom; there are some wonderful successes: JCB, Jaguar-Rover, Glaxo and John Harvey-Jones’s ICI from which Astra Zeneca was born, but also Alan Sugar’s Amstrad. There is hope for the future in manufacturing for the green revolution. Manufacturing will probably continue to employ fewer people, but more than offset by British innovation and skill.

How Britain Shaped the Manufacturing World is published by and is available from Pen & Sword . My proposal for Whatever Happened to British Manufacturing has been accepted. I am delighted and look forward to producing a book that is thoroughly positive about modern British manufacturing. 

The University of Lincoln has one of the newest departments of engineering in Britain. 

Patterns of employment - both now and back to 1851

The jobs that people do change for a host of reasons. In particular, there has been a long term shift since the ends of the 1960s from manufacturing to services. Now, post Covid, a further shift is coming and a Guardian leader encouraged a glance back to Harold Wilson for a guide of how to manage this change.

Looking at headline unemployment in the sixties, it was a steady (and acceptable) 2%. Looking deeper, falling demand for coal meant that around 250,000 mining jobs disappeared in the decade, yet this did not result in an increase in the unemployment percentage. It seems that new jobs were created and people moved. Of course, it wasn't as simple as that, but, with proper attention to re-training and the provision of income in the transition period, changes in employment can be managed. 

Looking at employment in manufacturing over the long term, I was at first surprised by its ebbs and flows. On reflection it begins to make more sense. The graph in the ONS report starts in 1861, but I also have statistics from the earlier census of 1851. The largest manufacturing sector was textiles, which was the main but not the only thrust of the Industrial Revolution. It was though, at one million employees, smaller than agriculture with two million and the same size as domestic service. The role of coal in powering the revolution was crucial. In 1851, it employed two hundred thousand miners well below peak employment at the start of the Great War. 

ONS sector analysis goes back to 1928 when manufacturing employed a quarter of all employees. This was two years before the total employment rate reached an all time low of just 61% of those between 16 and 64. The previous peak figure was 76% in 1872 and the subsequent peak of the same percentage came in 1943. Looking more closely at manufacturing, the interwar years saw the percentage share of manufacturing at around 25%. Post war, with the export drive, this increased to 29% through the fifties and sixties before falling back to 22% by the end of the seventies. The eighties witnessed as further fall to 15% with the nineties coming in at just 10%. 

The ONS also gives figures for the value of output, and here manufacturing does rather better as the benefits of mechanisation are felt. Manufacturing output at the end of the sixties made up 30% of national output, essentially on a par with the share of employment. By the end of the seventies it had fallen to 23% and to 17% at the end of the eighties, just nudging ahead of employment. The nineties saw a fall to 15%, comfortably ahead employment. 

David Edgerton, in his book The Rise and Fall of the British Nation, makes the point that Britain's manufacturing success in the fifties and sixties was laudable; it was just that other countries were doing better. Today, even though productivity has increased, Britain still lags behind nations who have embraced technology more wholeheartedly. In 2014, the website Drives and Controls suggested that in terms of output, manufacturing was then producing as much as it had in the 1970s. The ONS report on which this article was based may be found by following this link. 

The signs are good, with almost daily announcements of investment in leading edge technology, not least with British manufacturers of both electric and hydrogen powered buses. 

Alexander Dennis and NFI Group