Earlier this month unions and industry federations – including the BPIF – joined forces to call for a nationwide manufacturing effort to fight Covid-19 and produce much-needed items such as testing kits and PPE materials.
The CBI added its backing for the call to arms this week.
Unite assistant general secretary for manufacturing Steve Turner has made the call for urgent action at the highest level of government.
He said that companies that were able to help, for example with manufacturing capacity or much-needed materials, had been left frustrated at the lack of response from officialdom.
“The biggest problem is getting the government to co-ordinate this. People are telling me they have filled in an online form, they get an automated response, and then nothing,” he stated.
“This needs a general to join the dots and pick this up. It needs central co-ordination and it’s only the government that can really do that and link up all the areas. That’s why we’ve made a call for a minister at Cabinet level to be given specific responsibility with cross-departmental authority and budgets and everything else to build that team to join the dots.”
Turner said the success of the ‘ventilator challenge’ proved that similar projects could work, given suitable leadership and co-ordination.
Firms and organisations involved with the manufacturing army project are using the hashtag #PPEChallenge on social media.
“People are doing heroic things. With PPE we’ve got a range of items that are desperately needed on a national level. People are producing it and giving it to local care homes and hospitals. But we need to ramp it up to millions of pieces per week, with the distribution to get it to the right people at the right time. It’s shameful that hasn’t happened, and it needs to change," he said.
“Testing is the same, we’ve got people manufacturing testing equipment and testing kits. None of them have orders from the UK government,” he added.
Turner said the current crisis around much-needed supplies had exposed the “collapse in UK manufacturing resilience” over past decades.
“There is no stock in the supply chain and very little warehousing. It’s not good enough for our NHS,” he said.
“It has exposed a real fragility in supply chains and we can’t go back to the way things were after this. There’s a groundswell of opinion that we really need to grasp this – what sort of society do we want to be? Things can’t be the same on the other side of this. We need resilience in our supply chain and the re-shoring of decent jobs and everything that goes with that, such as apprenticeships.”
Printweek could not reach the Downing Street press office for comment at the time of writing.
A host of printing industry firms, including Prime Group, ProCo, Precision Printing, Cimpress, Speedscreen and Windles have swung into action to produce PPE visors.
