The Trend of British Industries.

Press, Volume LXIV, Issue 19212, 19 January 1928, Page 6

The Trend of British Industries.

The latest issue of Lloyds Bank Monthly contains an interesting review of the trend of industries in Great Britain during the last four years, based on the Labour Ministry's figures for the number of workers insured against unemployment under the Unemployment Insurance Acts. During this period industries employing 5,033,000 workers in 1923 increased

their numbers by 874,000, while industries employing 4,158,000 workers in 1923 showed a decline of 304,000. As the industries in these two groups employ about 80 per cent, of the total of insured workers, these figures can be taken as a fairly trustworthy indication of the trend of industrial development. In the industries which have contracted between 1923 and 1927 coal-mining dropped from a percentage of 10.83 to 9.88 of the total, shipbuilding from 2.35 to 1.78, iron and steel manufactures from 2.09 to 1.81, general engineering from 5.81 to 4.95, and the woollen and worsted textile industry from 2.35 to 2.05 of the total. In the expanding industries the distributive trades increased from 10.92 per cent, of the total to 13.03, building and public works contracting from 7.35 to 8.39, brick and tile manufacture from .77 to 1.02, silk and artificial silk manufacture from .32 to .45, and motor vehicles from 1.67 to 1.92 of the total. The interesting point about these figures is that the heaviest decline has taken place in the coalmining, textile, and heavy iron and steel industries carried on in the northern parts of Britain, while the industries in which the greatest expansion has occurred are for the most part located in the south. If we take an imaginary line from the Wash to Portsmouth as dividing the northern industrial area from the south, we find that whereas the total increase of workers employed between 1923 and 1927 was 5i per cent., the northern section shows an increase of under 22 per cent., while the increase in the southern section is 8.32 per cent. The last annual report of the Labour Ministry remarks guardedly on this point that "certain observers have "drawn attention to a tendency for "industrial development to move from " the north towards the midlands and "southland to turn from'big estab"lishments operating near the supplies of coal fuel to smaller estab"lishments more widely scattered and " drawing their power from elec- " tricity." It is too soon yet to say whether this tendency will become a definite drift, but the opening up of coal-mines among the Kentish hopfields and proposals to exploit the iron that lies beneath Miss Sheila KayeSmith's Sussex gorse have aroused alarm and indignation among those who think they see the England of their poets and novelists, the green England that belongs to the past, defiled by the sooty hand of industry.