The NI changes are going to cost my organisation £1000 per employee

The bit about voting for change but not getting it is the nail on the head. Both Tory and Labour over the past few decades are basically the same and they’re not doing what they promise nor what the voters want. Hence the rise of extremes nit just in the uk but across Europe too! Two cheeks of the same arse is remarkably accurate!

No it doesn't but this one does....

www.nesta.org.uk/blog/uk-household-electricity-prices-rose-to-levels-higher-than-those-in-any-eu-country/

The UK has the most expensive electricity in Europe, once standing charges are included.
Energy suppliers are now raking in huge profits, Centrica made almost 1billion from their renewables sector, the CEO of Octopus is heading towards being a billionaire....

Ofcom like Ofwat is a regulator working hand in glove with the sector encouraged by both Tory and Lab governments.

We also have some of the most expensive goods and groceries.... funnily enough, wages are among the lowest of comparable economies.

Why Labour isn't quite so keen to cut these, instead of WFA is a bit of mystery or as the BBC's World Service said this morning "People vote for change but then don't get it, so move to the extremes"

Starmer would do well to realise this.

The cost of energy in Europe has made manufacturing here uneconomic.

I hope this link works; it's a bracing read.https://mail.hover.com/?_task=mail&_caps=pdf%3D1%2Cflash%3D0%2Ctiff%3D0%2Cwebp%3D1%2Cpgpmime%3D0&_uid=15669&_mbox=Spam&_action=show]

We cannot compete in mainstream manufacturing & where we can, consumers don't buy it.

Look at EV's or renewables? how can western countries match their production and labour costs?

More niche stuff we can, like Oxford Solar but Sunak said NO...

The Chinese take our tech, which we gladly sell them.. mass produce it and sell it back to us and all the patriotic people buy it...

Personally? i would never buy a Lenovo laptop or a MG etc EV, no matter the saving.

If we want more UK/European manufacturing, we'll have to start buying what we do have... an VW ID3 is a great EV or a ford puma or a Vauxhall Corsa but how many would prefer to save a couple of '000 and buy a Chinese car, then moan about the decline of our manufacturing base & vote Reform.... perverse.

There is lots of manufacturing left, but some is like ours. Our tiny SME is a bespoke remanufacturer of heat transfer technology. If you have a large capital asset, like a ship or a factory or a hotel or a hospital or a power station, it almost certainly needs to add or lose heat somewhere in its structure or manufacturing system. A cruise liner has to deliver a hot shower when the paying passenger wants one. So we are asked to clean, test, maintain or rebuild and often improve the efficiency of legacy systems. Many OEMs went under, or were bought out in the late 80s and early 90s when the margins were very tight, so we manufacture bits of kit to replace worn out items to pattern. We do one-off jobs remaking parts made by companies that have long gone, using skills that owe more to history than technology and that are being lost with each year as the old salty dogs retire.

@Blossomtoes asked me why we haven't sold the business so DH can retire? We have been trying for several years, but commercial teams are not keen on businesses where demand cannot be created by marketing. Our customers find their way to us, usually by word of mouth. And hiring a new MD really isn't easy because the work comes from all over in chunky projects rather than mass-manufacturing a widget that can be sold in a neat box for Amazon to deliver; we build a crate to ship. Finding someone with the engineering knowledge to understand the task, spec it, price it and find the materials, then oversee the work to the deadline who also has the commercial nous to make it pay has been uphill. We trained someone for five years, only for them to say they didn't want the sleepless nights when the business went quiet, or to go without a salary in those months. 2024 has been a very difficult year for 11 months, and for some reason December trading is off the scale busy.

Because it can’t be reversed. No country could reverse the wholesale destruction of industry that took well over a century to build up. When the skills have gone they’ve gone, there’s nobody left to pass them on.

There was a massive manufacturing base in 1997. The decline continued throughout the Blair years. You really can't say we made nothing back then at all. Blair did absolutely nothing to reverse the decline, nor did the Tories after the Blair years. As said above, the UK is still in the top 10 of the World's exporters - it was higher in the World rankings in 1997!

Financial services are very transient in nature and can very easily be offshored. My son works for one of the UK's biggest life/pensions/insurance firms and they have huge teams based offshore in places like Poland, and that's planned to grow. They're not providing services in Poland - just workers in Poland dealing with UK policyholders, UK investors, etc.

He had no choice. There was no manufacturing base left by 1997.

Blair enthusiastically embraced the same ideology.

Oxford Economics puts the total value of UK manufacturing at over 500 billion, around 23% of total GDP.

We are very good at exporting part finished goods but as i said earlier, we simply cannot compete with China etc, as Germany is finding out with EVs.

But we also don't help ourselves, Oxford Solar went to the UK govt and asked for money to set up a manufacturing facility, Sunak said NO, Germany said YES.... we now import these world beating Solar panels.

We are also the most expensive place to set up a business in Europe, because of rents and business rates.
Despite the NI increases, the UKs employment costs are among the lowest in Europe.

Manufacturing was 18.54% of GDP in Germany in 2023. In the UK, 8.2%.

As to trains, the UK does very little manufacturing - it's mostly assembly of components imported to Britain. Even the contract process for rolling stock for the HS2 line stipulated that the stock should at least be assembled in Britain, even if not manufactured here.

It's clear that a lot of people don't have a bloody clue what manufacturing is (or how much is still done in the UK) or what constitutes services (or how much economic value they create).

I live in a larger market town, and the typical attitude from the local gammonatti is that "We don't make nothing no more" - very similar to what several are saying here. But I can think of five world class manufacturers in the town that are market leaders in their field worldwide (and that's just the ones inside the bypass). But they're not widely appreciated locally as manufacturers of that calibre because they're not the neanderthal metal-bashing industries of Ye Olde Victorian England that constitute 'manufacturing' to a certain world view. There is manufacturing taking place on the industrial estates of every town, and some of it is much higher in economic value than someone casually walking past would give credit to.

Depending exactly how its measured, the UK is around the 9th largest manufacturing exporting nation in the world.

We also make trains here and wind turbines.

85% of our economy is services, true, Germany is 80% services.

Financial Services are a huge earner for the country.

We in the West cannot compete with SE Asian/Chinese manufacturing costs.. as can be seen with EV's

Once you’ve closed manufacturing industries it’s impossible to revive them. The skills and machinery are lost. You only have to look at the struggle to retain the remnants of the steel industry we still have left to get just a hint of the size of the task.

Yeah she seemed keen on closing domestic industries so we can have goods imported to us. But over 30 years on, no other government has made things better.

And for that we have Thatcher to thank.

Nail on the head. Absolute folly to think we can have a successful economy on the back of "services" and neglect manufacturing and exploiting our natural resources. Sounds good in theory but very dangerous and unsustainable in practice, hence where we are after a few decades of that approach, relying on other countries for our power, food, household appliances, cars, etc etc. Even solar panels and wind turbines and trains are made abroad and shipped into the UK.

A few of the train operating companies have already been taken over by the government, so are already effectively nationalised.

Can’t comment on NHS but this is exactly what’s happening in universities. The tuition fee rise has been more than taken up by NI increase. Plus anywhere with a medical school also has to pay for the NHS pay rises!

Many young people don’t want to go into caring or do hard jobs, I honestly think the UK is doomed long term

Why would anyone actively want to go into care work? its a min wage job with no prospects.

Up the pay, create an advancement structure ie team leaders, specialist training, such as physio and ot, drug administration, give company vehicles and watch people queue up to work in the sector.

But no one will pay the taxes to enable this...

In surveys, care comes out as one of the most satisfying jobs ot there!!

To settle the drivers dispute, it cost £135m, a tiny amount.

I don't agree with the waste in the NHS, my DD works in it and what she sees is ever increasing demand, younger and younger stroke patients, the obese, the elderly, its endless, more and more patients get less and less on going care, sent home too soon, because of no space, re admitted with worse complications, often falls.

Kings fund says the NHS is one of the most efficient health services in the world but its under funded for our chronically sick nation, so has poor outcomes.

Reform is all very well but meanwhile the service still needs to treat patients.

Reform is just a word bandied about, without any realisation of the impacts and costs or is used when people cannot think of anything else to say/add.

The problem with the UK is we don’t actually produce anything anymore. Most profitable industries have closed down or moved abroad. We have a skills shortage that I imagine will get worse.

The public sector is too big- obviously I’m not talking about police officers or nurses, I mean pen pushers who don’t actually produce anything. The public sector is payed for by tax payers , again a large amount of people to pay.

Lots of people work in low skilled jobs such as retail , near enough on minimum wage again don’t actually produce anything but provide a valuable service.

On top of that , an aging population and millions of economically inactive people of working age.

Many young people don’t want to go into caring or do hard jobs, I honestly think the UK is doomed long term.

If i saw a move to real change I would swallow a tax rise (as a high rate tax payer). There is certainly an argument to say the lower rate needs to increase.
NHS spending is unsustainable. There desperately needs reform, possibly a new model. The waste within the public sector generally is eye watering. We get told “there’s no money for reform”. Excellent, so we all keep filling a leaky bucket?

As mentioned by someone else the train driver pay off was utterly wrong. A pay rise in exchange for no change to working methods and no increase in productivity. The trains need reform and modernisation. We need an efficient system. I use the trains regularly and they are worse now than ever. I’m always staggered that I walk off my (delayed train through driver/train unavailability) to several people checking tickets?!? Just create E gates. But the unions balk at any change that results in job cuts. The system, therefore, remains broken.

My employers are facing closing, they're a not for profit organisation. In a meeting we were told that the new NI rules will cost them an extra £300,000. They can't sustain it, it's so sad.