«how difficult it was to recruit and retain engineers. Every manufacturer was understaffed, and trained engineers had the whip hand, especially young engineers as companies had to deal with a wave of retirements by older engineers»
That is just a temporary blip: manufacturing in the UK has no future, whether cars or anything else but weap…
«how difficult it was to recruit and retain engineers. Every manufacturer was understaffed, and trained engineers had the whip hand, especially young engineers as companies had to deal with a wave of retirements by older engineers»
That is just a temporary blip: manufacturing in the UK has no future, whether cars or anything else but weapons. There have been studies by some think-tanks suggesting to defund both education and research in "legacy" areas, by which they mean engineering and computing, because for engineering products buying from Asia is much cheaper than manufacturing here, and for computing workers it is much cheaper to hire them from Asia, and in both cases it is asian taxpayers who pay for training engineering and computing graduates, saving a lot of money to the english taxpayer.
This is not a theoretical discussion: this has already been done to medicine, where the governments of the past 40 years have progressively cut funding for medicine degree to around 25-30% of what is required for the UK, so that 60% of newly registered UK doctors have a foreign degree, paid entirely by foreign taxpayers.
"Last year 59% of new registrations in England had been trained by other countries, writes Prof Rachel Jenkins [...] The number of medical student training places in the UK needs to double. This should not be as expensive to Treasury as feared"
“Unpublished figures from the General Medical Council (GMC) show that 7,377 (37%) of the 19,977 doctors who started work in the NHS in 2021 had a British qualification. A total of 10,009 new medics learned medicine outside the UK and the EEA – so-called international medical graduates (IMGs) – compared with 9,968 within. [...] In 2021 a total of 1,645 doctors from India began working in the UK, as did 1,629 from Pakistan, 1,250 from Egypt, 1,197 from Nigeria and 522 from Sudan – a total of 6,243. They comprised 31.3% of all the medics who joined the GMC register, and almost two-thirds (62.4%) of the IMGs.”
«how difficult it was to recruit and retain engineers. Every manufacturer was understaffed, and trained engineers had the whip hand, especially young engineers as companies had to deal with a wave of retirements by older engineers»
That is just a temporary blip: manufacturing in the UK has no future, whether cars or anything else but weapons. There have been studies by some think-tanks suggesting to defund both education and research in "legacy" areas, by which they mean engineering and computing, because for engineering products buying from Asia is much cheaper than manufacturing here, and for computing workers it is much cheaper to hire them from Asia, and in both cases it is asian taxpayers who pay for training engineering and computing graduates, saving a lot of money to the english taxpayer.
This is not a theoretical discussion: this has already been done to medicine, where the governments of the past 40 years have progressively cut funding for medicine degree to around 25-30% of what is required for the UK, so that 60% of newly registered UK doctors have a foreign degree, paid entirely by foreign taxpayers.
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2022/feb/09/britain-needs-to-double-the-number-of-doctors-it-trains
"Last year 59% of new registrations in England had been trained by other countries, writes Prof Rachel Jenkins [...] The number of medical student training places in the UK needs to double. This should not be as expensive to Treasury as feared"
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2022/jun/08/nhs-hiring-more-doctors-from-outside-uk-and-eea-than-inside-for-first-time
“Unpublished figures from the General Medical Council (GMC) show that 7,377 (37%) of the 19,977 doctors who started work in the NHS in 2021 had a British qualification. A total of 10,009 new medics learned medicine outside the UK and the EEA – so-called international medical graduates (IMGs) – compared with 9,968 within. [...] In 2021 a total of 1,645 doctors from India began working in the UK, as did 1,629 from Pakistan, 1,250 from Egypt, 1,197 from Nigeria and 522 from Sudan – a total of 6,243. They comprised 31.3% of all the medics who joined the GMC register, and almost two-thirds (62.4%) of the IMGs.”