Aircraft Industry “Waste” Attacked

Press, Volume CIV, Issue 30724, 13 April 1965, Page 18

Aircraft Industry “Waste” Attacked

(N.Z.P.A - Reuter —Copyright) BIRMINGHAM (England), April 11. The Minister for Economic Affairs (Mr George Brown) today attacked waste of money and manpower in the British aircraft industry.

He said the Government’s cancellation of the TSR2 bomber programme would save each man, woman and child in the country £l5 a year.

Mr Brown told a political meeting that the former Conservative Government had subsidised the aircraft industry to the amount of £3OO a year for every family in Britain, yet the money had been wasted on aircraft that could not be exported or even used.

Since 1958 the industry’s exports had fallen from 30 to 20 per cent of its total production. In 1964 it had earned only 21 per cent of Britain’s foreign exchange, while absorbing 25 per cent of the nation’s expenditure on research and development. Mr Brown said Britain had a serious shortage of skilled manpower, yet the aircraft industry alone took 10 per cent of the country’s most highly-

qualified industrial scientists and technologists—including 25 per cent of all the mathematicians in industry. “Civil export prospects are much better than they have been for Britain . . . but on the military side they are dismal—and the military side accounts for 70 per cent of the industry.”