Aluminium industry “vital to the growth” of the UK manufacturing sector

The aluminium industry is “vital to the growth” of the UK manufacturing sector, says Dr. Alan Arthur, Marketing and Communications Executive at Aluminium Federation Ltd (ALFED).

Speaking at the Advanced Engineering UK group of events, Arthur said: “Often we understate the value of engineering, manufacturing and certainly aluminium in the UK”.

Yet, he said, “the aluminium industry has a £3.2 billion annual turnover and employs directly around 20,000 people”, demonstrating how vital the aluminium industry is to the UK economy.

This employment figure rises dramatically when the number of people who support the aluminium industry is included, and "you begin to see how large the aluminium industry is", said Arthur.

In regards to the supply chain of the aluminium industry, Arthur said: “the UK has a large number of [Small and Medium Enterprises] who supply the materials to the larger companies”.

Arthur added that this demonstrates that a lot of skills and knowledge are “contained in the SME supply base”, which is “absolutely critical to the UK economy”.

In order for the aluminium industry to support the continuing growth of the manufacturing sector, he said that the key challenges are “two-fold”.

Firstly, he said that skills is a critical factor, because "if we don’t have the skills we’ll lose the work, and once we’ve lost the work it wont come back”.

“The other is material supply, much of the material used in the UK is actually sourced from outside the UK because we don’t have the energy structure that allows us to do that in the UK”.

Concluding, Arthur says that “the aluminium industry needs to grow to support the activities of major manufacturers such as the automotive sector”.