Orders of the Day — Wool Industry (Research Levy)

Part of the debate – in the House of Commons at 12:00 am on 24 July 1952.

Alert me about debates like this

Photo of Mr Ian Mikardo Mr Ian Mikardo , Reading South 12:00, 24 July 1952

We know that his great talents allow him to do two things at once, although there are not many of us who, when we do two things at once, are capable of doing either of them really well. If I did him an injustice, I immediately apologise.

What I was saying before I was led astray—and perhaps that was my own fault—was that one of the reasons for the increased rate of the levy per employment unit was unhappily that the number of employment units in the industry would be smaller this year. If the Parliamentary Secretary wants to blame anybody for that he might look across the square in the direction of the Treasury. That is one of the reasons for the increase in the rate of levy per employment unit, and the increase in the amount of money raised will not be anything like so great as is suggested by the 70 per cent. increase in the rate of levy per employment unit. The increase is not, indeed, as sharp as appears on the surface.

One of the questions which I want to ask the Parliamentary Secretary is this. Under the new Order, and with the new amount which will be spent by the industry, how does the expenditure on research of the British woollen industry compare with the expenditure on research by woollen industries in other countries with whose product our woollen textile industry has to compete? I want to put to the Parliamentary Secretary what is my impression of the answer to that question—and I do not for one second pretend that it is authoritative, but I put to him my impression in the hope, indeed in the expectation, that to whatever extent I am wrong, he will correct me.

As my hon. Friend the Member for Ashton-under-Lyne said, this sum will represent an expenditure on research of about three-eighths of 1 per cent. of what has been roughly calculated to be the last full year's profits of the industry. I have an idea—not merely an impression, because it is based on some study—that in the United States of America the wool textile industry, which is younger than ours, much less skilled than ours and with nothing like the design or the craft or the work traditions of our industry, spends on research something approaching 1 per cent., not of its profits but of its turnover. There is a very wide gap between 1 per cent. of turnover and three-eighths of 1 per cent. of profits.

Of course, this situation is not confined to wool. I should quickly run myself out of order and be reproved by you, Mr. Deputy-Speaker, if I quoted any other examples, but perhaps you will allow me to say in half a sentence that the disproportion which I have quoted for wool is paralleled by a large number of other major industries in the country. There again the expenditure on research in other countries is a much greater proportion of turnover, or of profit, or of numbers of people employed, or of yardage, or of lbs. weight of wool spun, or whatever calculation you like, than in this country. I should like to ask the Parliamentary Secretary whether I am not right in saying that, even under this new Order the amount of money the British wool textile industry will be spending on research per whatever you like—per worker, per yard, per loom, what you will—will still be very very much less than is spent by those countries with whose products our woollen manufacturers have to compete.

There are two other points that I wish to put to the Parliamentary Secretary about the money which will be raised under this Order, and they both concern the allocation of this money, one as between the different institutions that will receive it and the other as between the different types of research work to which it will be devoted.

The Parliamentary Secretary said that amongst the institutions which will be assisted under this scheme are the establishments of the Wool Research Association, the universities and technical colleges, and he said the great part—I think those were his words—of the money goes to the establishments of the Wool Research Association. I think I am accurate in saying that the overwhelmingly greater part goes to the establishments of the Wool Research Association, and only a much smaller part to the universities and the technical colleges.

Of course, there is a certain pressure, an incentive, to get adequate finance for the Wool Research Association's establishments because, I think I am right in saying, it is not until they get £80,000 a year of their own that they qualify for the £30,000 a year D.S.I.R. grant. The Department of Scientific and Industrial Research is quite right in insisting that its own monetary help to industrial research shall be conditional upon each industry helping itself, and it is quite right to give the industry an incentive properly to give resources to its own research establishments before the D.S.I.R. come along and, so to speak, tops the thing up with an additional grant.

Unfortunately, there is one bad effect arising out of this situation. The fact that there is rather an arbitrary figure which the Wool Research Association has got to reach for its establishments before it qualifies for the D.S.I.R. grant means that the allocation of the money between, on the one hand, the Association's establishments and, on the other hand, the universities and technical colleges is not made on an assessment of which of these institutions can usefully use that money, is not made on an assessment of the forward research programmes of the institutions and an assessment of what money those programmes will require, but it is made frightfully arbitrary by saying, "We have got to give this to the Wool Research Association whether they are in a position to use it well or not so that we get the D.S.I.R. money, and after that the University of Leeds and the technical colleges of the West Riding and elsewhere can have what is left over, after we have given the Research Association enough money to qualify for the D.S.I.R. grant, whether it needs that much money, or wants it or not."

That really is a very great pity because, although I pay very great tribute to the research establishments of the Wool Research Association, which are doing very good work, I do not think anybody with first-hand experience of the work—and I am sure I carry with me in this my hon. Friend the Member for Ashton-under-Lyne, who knows a very great deal about it—will dispute that the most forward looking and the most imaginative research work in the industry is not done in the Research Association establishments but in industry. The most useful work in the industry, the most practical immediate work in the industry, the base work of application of research to working methods—that is done most of all in the technical colleges.

I am afraid that what the Wool Research Association does is to fall between two stools. It is neither fundamental, long term, basic, general research; nor is it research on immediate application of known knowledge, the known corpus of knowledge, to the actual work in the factory. Both those two things are very necessary, but as the immediate, short term problem in industry the second is more necessary than the first.

We have almost got to the stage in wool—with the hundreds of years this country has been a great producer of fine woollen cloths—when what we want in the industry is not to get more knowledge by research, but to find out ways of applying more widely the knowledge we have got. That is work being done preeminently in the technical colleges, and the real, fundamental research into the things which condition what the industry will be likely to be doing in 10 or 15 years' time is being done at the universities, and what the Wool Research Association is doing for the most part is some nebulous thing in between those two things.

It is spending too much of its time and money on the unprogrammed, non schematic finding of the answers to ad hoc questions put up to it by manufacturers who are members of the Research Association. The Research Association cannot refuse to give assistance in this direction and to attempt to answer questions that are put un to it by people who are actually subscribers to its funds, and if some manufacturer who finds a snag in his finishing process, or that one of his machines starts to finish a bit squiffy one week and to turn out finishing work that is not standard, and the finishing shop foreman cannot find the answer to it, there is a great temptation to ring up the Research Association and say, "What's wrong with this machine? It is turning out stuff with spots the size of a halfpenny along the selvedge." The Association immediately devotes its mind to it, and to answering such requests for help from its subscribers. I am not saying at all that this is not useful. It is very useful; it has considerable practical effect; but it really does not supply the answer to what are the fundamental problems of the woollen industry.

Therefore, I invite the Parliamentary Secretary to consider the allocation of the money under this Order—and I know that, as a former worker in this House for the universities, and one with knowledge of education and research, I shall strike a chord in him when I invite him to consider the way he is to allocate it under this Order, and how it is going to be spent—whether, in his judgment, starting from a blank sheet of paper, the allocation of this money as between the universities and technical colleges, on the one hand, and the research establishments on the other, is the best way to enable the industry to make the best progress and to enable us to get the best out of it.

The second point I ant to make—and I apologise for talking so long—about allocation I have already touched on, and that is the allocation as between different types of work. We all realise, of course, that the maintenance of quality in the products of this industry is at least as important for the welfare of the industry as it is in the case of any other industry, but, of course, there are other factors which need to be considered as well as the purely qualitative factors—to an increasing extent when the products of our wool mills are meeting price competition in overseas markets; and we have, therefore, got to get, not so much better quality for the same money, so to speak, but the same quality at a lower price.

Therefore, we have to consider operative savings. We cannot do much unilaterally about the price of raw material, and the fundamental difference between the woollen textiles, on the one hand, and other textiles like jute, cotton or synthetic fibres, on the other. In wool a much higher proportion of the cost of the end product consists of raw material costs than it does in the case of any other textile. Therefore, wool is much more than any textile industry at the mercy of the wool fluctuations of world markets, over which at best we have only marginal control.

We have got to help ourselves where it lies within our power to do so, and that is in the field of labour costs. In that field undoubtedly the place where most saving is to be made is in weaving. In the past we have, I believe, concentrated too much on the design and operation of the machine, that is to say, the loom, and far too little to a study of whether we are using the right raw materials in each case for the cloth we want to produce.

One reason why the woollen textile industries are much less efficient than the metal industries, speaking generally, is that in the metal industries raw materials are bought to specification. A manufacturer says, "I want a one inch steel bar of a certain kind," and he figures how much compression strength and hardness that is wanted, the material is specified on that basis. Then it is tested in the store to see if it has those characteristics, and the manufacturer does not pay for it if it has not the characteristics which he ordered. If it has, he can put it in his shop knowing it is going to behave in the way he planned. He knows the degree of skill that is going to be required to handle that article, because he knows the material—if I may use a factory phrase—will not get up on its hind legs and behave awkwardly.

It is much more difficult to do that with a natural raw material or vegetable material, like wool or cotton, than it is with a mineral material like steel, but within certain limits it is possible to certify materials. A manufacturer knows that if a given cloth is to be woven on a loom which is exerting a given tension, he wants a yarn of this much strength and certainly no less because it will break and mending the breaks will cost money, and certainly no more, because if it is too high a quality he is paying more for the raw materials than that particular cloth happens to need.

I believe that here there is an enormous field of research for the research establishments. In a very humble way I have been doing a little myself, and I have tried to apply to this standardisation and specification of yarn some of the statistical techniques of quality control that are used in industries like engineering and the manufacture of electric lamps. This is a large-scale job, and I should like to think that something like one-third of the money we are here asked for in this Order was going to be devoted over the next year or two to study along those lines, because I am quite satisfied that if the Parliamentary Secretary asks he will find that many people agree that it is in this direction that the next significant advance will have to be made in increasing efficiency in the operation of weaving woollen cloth.

That is the sort of thing that is scarcely being done at all. Either there are people doing large-scale, long-term fundamental research, or those concerned on how para- sites in a sheep's back will affect one's fifth process in finishing for dyeing a year later. That is all very pretty, and interesting in an academic way, but it is not of immediate concern. Or, there are people answering ad hoc questions on matters popping up in one factory, or on one particular machine, which are not duplicated anywhere else for a long time, if at all.

We need a better programme of woollen industry research through the Wool Research Association's establishments, but I believe that it lies particularly in the universities; to a lesser extent in the technical colleges, where we shall find a capacity for doing a programme of that sort in the shape of a really schematic piece of research in wool textiles.

I know that the Parliamentary Secretary would be dealing with autonomous bodies, jealous of their own independence, and jealous of what he might suggest but he is a persuasive, as well as an honourable Gentleman, and if he devoted his mind to these matters he could, without interfering with the plans of anybody, persuade these authorities to have a look at this matter. I beg of him to make a first-hand study of the subject and see if he does not, as a result, reach something like the conclusions which, in all humility, I have endeavoured to put before him.