Orders of the Day — Re-Armament

Part of the debate – in the House of Commons at 12:00 am on 23 July 1951.

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Photo of Sir Austen Albu Sir Austen Albu , Edmonton 12:00, 23 July 1951

All those concerned with the manufacture of armaments, equally the Ministry of Supply, the Admiralty, the contractors and also the British tool manufacturers, sometimes over-complicate their machines so that it is not possible to buy the simple machines which are needed. I am prepared to rely on the argument of Sir Alfred Herbert, who probably knows more about this subject than anybody else in the country.

The Report draws attention to the need for shift working, overtime and dilution, subjects which have already been touched on in this debate. The trade unions will co-operate in all these matters, as they are already doing. The right hon. Member for Southport (Mr. R. S. Hudson), however, seemed to think that in some way by the use of these methods it should not be necessary to build so many factories. But one of the objects of the armament programme is the establishment of plant and machinery which would be available in case of war and not necessarily for immediate use. I should have thought that the creation of a reserve capacity for armament production was as important as the creation of arms themselves, particularly if one takes into account the rapidly changing developments in modern weapons. But the right hon. Gentleman's arguments assume that labour is available.

It is necessary to do everything that is possible to improve methods of production which will save labour and machine time. Hon. Members have referred to better planning and production management. I believe that one of the main causes of the very rapid increase in production in this country, particularly in the engineering industry, of the last few years has been the great attention that has been paid—and I think that hon. Members opposite should give credit to the Government for this, because they have made great efforts in connection with it—to production and management methods generally.

I should have thought that the attitude of labour was determined by better organisation of work in the workshops, and by better management methods. Where that sort of thing exists it is generally found that restrictive practices fall to the ground, since there follows co-operation between management and labour and the proper planning of work which insures a continual flow. These are major factors in productivity increase.

Another matter to which far too little attention is given today is research into manufacturing methods, particularly in the metal forming and other material forming processes which are so important in armament production. It is necessary to do this sort of research not only in order to produce the equipment that we want now, but to insure that as new designs come forward—especially if there should be a war, for there is rapid development of weapon design during a war—factories can be quickly switched over to full-scale production of the new weapons. This often has to take place in firms without experience of that class of work.

A rather interesting article recently appeared in "The Engineer" by Dr. Galloway, the Director of the Production Engineering Research Association, in which he said: Only by developing basic production techniques in advance of the needs of the armaments factories is it possible to avoid the costly process of developing techniques by protracted trial and error on the production side, a process which not only gives rise to considerable waste of time, labour and materials, but which frequently fails to develop the best techniques. An example of the failure to develop a manufacturing technique parallel with the development of design is the problem of that machining of nimonic alloys used in jet engine manufacture. I do not know whether it has yet been fully solved in this country or not, but the expense and importance of it can be seen by the fact that if there were a war we would probably need something like 5 million turbine and compressor blades every month, and the problem of machining these blades is a very serious one.

An example of how time can be saved is in the machining of dies used in the manufacture of bullets. These dies are made of a very special hard material and, by research into their methods of manufacture, their machining time was reduced from 24 to 7½ minutes—the cost was halved, with an immediate saving of £5,000. Instead of two lathes being used, they are now made on one capstan and, with further research, the entire requirements of this vital item in wartime could be turned out on one standard automatic machine. That was at the cost of about £200 in special research into the method of manufacture.

In the United States far more work is going on on these lines than in this country. There experiments are going on to substitute a cold extrusion process for the usual forging and machining in the manufacture of shells. I do not know if similar experiments are going on in Royal Ordnance Factories. I am told that such a process would have saved us 960,000 tons of steel in the last war, in addition to a great saving of labour and machine time. In fact a very small sum now spent on this sort of work would make a great saving in the future.