Bombardier — House of Lords, 2018-11-22
Topic: Foreign Trade
Charlotte Vere (Conservative, Centre-right): I thank the noble Lord, Lord Stevenson, and the noble Lady, Baroness Randerson, for their contributions. A number of issues were raised, and I will cover as many as I can. I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Stevenson, that it was very good that we managed to fend off the tariffs coming from the US. I pay tribute to the work done by the unions, and to the Prime Minster, who was instrumental in making sure that Bombardier was not hit by these very significant tariffs, which would have had a very difficult impact on its business Over the coming days, we will meet with Bombardier —I think the first meeting is this afternoon. We will encourage the company to work with the unions; I am disappointed to hear that it did not. We are at the very start of a 90-day consultation period, which will obviously include numerous meetings with the unions, employees and, indeed, the company On the comments in the Statement about the commitments that have been given, these are not at all inconsistent with what is happening. My understanding is that different parts of the business are responding in different ways to the global markets for their respective products. Certainly, the Airbus-Bombardier joint venture is proceeding successfully—that is about a quarter of the workforce in Belfast—and there is no reason to suspect that there will be any job losses at all there. Our ongoing discussions with Bombardier are very good, because it is a key part of the aerospace growth partnership, which meets to discuss the aerospace sector as a whole. The department has a budget of £1.98 billion to invest in R&D over a 13-year period to support the growth of the sector and its transition to new technologies On parts of manufacturing going to Morocco and Mexico, that is indeed the case. Some of that involves less-skilled workers and less highly manufactured parts, but what we need to do is to make sure that the R&D is there and that the skilled employment exists to allow those jobs to come back as technology moves on. That is where we are putting our money We are confident that the Northern Irish Government have the resources to support the workers to retrain or to find work, but it is important that we understand that we do not currently know who will lose their jobs. We do not know whether that will be compulsory or voluntary, so it is very difficult to talk about retraining or new jobs for these people until we know who they are The Government will not be reviewing the £20 million that we contributed to Bombardier in conjunction with Invest Northern Ireland, because it was R&D spending. We have to be clear that research and development is the Government priming the pump. I am afraid that the engine has to run itself, but it is our job to make sure that we put seed funding into projects that we know will be a step change to coming new technologies Turning to some of the detail from the noble Baroness, Lady Randerson, obviously I cannot commit right here, right now about a trade deal with the US, but she will doubtless be reassured that we will be looking to create as many new trading relationships as we possibly can. That will certainly have benefits when it comes to future tariffs. Regarding the supply chain, again, it is too early to tell because we do not know where the jobs will come from, what elements of the business will be downsizing and what the consequences will be for the supply chain. It might be that the manufacturing elements are slightly overstaffed as technology has improved, and that the impact on the supply chain will be very small because there will still be products going through it. Until we understand that a bit more, I do not think that we can comment on it.