Comment & Analysis
Today marks the 10 year anniversary of MG Rover going into administration.
The break-up of the last British-owned volume car manufacturer was one of the first stories I covered for Professional Engineering. A look back through the archives reveals that PE had a befittingly sanguine attitude towards the whole affair.
Both PE and its readers, via the regular Q&A survey, seemed to think that MG Rover was a lost-cause, had long been such and did not deserve rescuing with public funds.
Headlines such as “Salvagers find little left to sell”, “Partners go it alone”, “Shanghai deal under scrutiny” and “Prospects bright for skilled Rover workers”, show the sombre yet resilient tone of the news on offer in the magazine that month.
April 2005's survey shows that readers weren't buying MG Rover cars – only 6.5%, 26 out of 400 asked, had bought one since 2000. Some 62% of readers thought the company shouldn't be bailed out by the government. However, most, 64%, thought the MG brand had a future making sportscars.
At fault was decades of disparate and ineffective management compounded by branding diluted by the piecemeal sale of its best assets. Combined with the poor productivity of its Longbridge plant and lacklustre sales, MG Rover was an unsustainable business that could not be saved, despite the importance of the 6,000 jobs that were lost when it closed down.
It's easy to be heavy-handed with criticism 10 years after the event. The bones have been picked over many time before by many different experts. Nevertheless, the demise of MG Rover was totemic. I still encounter people, especially outside of the UK, who believe that its collapse was a death knell for the UK's automotive industry. Symbolic of the lowly status of industry and engineering in the UK.
Yet the truth is ten years later, and despite a global recession, the UK's automotive sector is in rude health. Despite fears that automotive engineering expertise and work would drain out of the UK after MG Rover's collapse, last month more than a £1 billion investments were announced by Honda, Jaguar Land Rover and Geely for their UK sites.
The UK's largest car manufacturer in 2005 was Nissan's Sunderland plant, which produced 315,297 vehicles. Almost ten years later, it still is. The plant produced 500,238 vehicles last year.
In total, more than 1.5 million vehicles were made in the UK last year, the most since 2007.
Meanwhile, the Mini, which stayed with BMW when MG Rover was hived off to Phoenix Venture Holdings in 2000, has gone from strength to strength and regularly been one of BMW's top sellers. Jaguar Land Rover, now owned by India's Tata Motors, is a runaway global success story. The company generates £11bn in export revenues. A fifth of all of the UK's exports to China are JLR vehicles.
Still if you want to dwell in the past, the internet can accommodate you. Unlike most internet sites, the BBC still has its “MG Rover – the collapse in depth” web pages up. I'll be looking for stories about the exciting work happening in the UK's automotive sector which, with incoming technologies such as internet-connected cars, alternative fuels and driverless vehicles, has never looked so attractive.