Lower taxes key to rebirth of UK engineering

The launch of the Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering (17 November) is timely and symbolic. It will help inspire the new wave of leading engineering minds we so urgently need. It's a turn of the key to unlocking the massive critical challenges facing our world today – from overpopulation to energy security. My institution proposed it. We wholeheartedly support it. But it will be meaningless to the likes of our railway engineers at Bombardier in Derby who are shortly to become redundant, or to the 500 workers at the Rio Tinto Alco smelting plant in Northumberland who have just heard they are to lose their jobs, or to the 20,000 workers in the solar renewables industry whose jobs are at risk due to a government volte-face in energy tariffs, unless more is done to encourage British engineering. We so urgently need clarity in our country's long-term vision for our energy provision, our digital infrastructure and transport. We need a targeted industrial strategy to resurrect manufacturing from 11% of GDP to 20% by 2020. To deliver this, we need the most competitive tax environment in the world. Only if we know where we are heading and with what velocity, will the massive inward and private sector investment needed be applied by confident investors. And only with all this in place, can the long lead-time skills supply-chain of engineers and technicians from our universities and colleges be geared up to a large enough scale to underpin it. You can't stop-start skills and great industries. There are good things coming into place such as the new Technology Innovation Centre and the grassroots of apprenticeship initiatives, but these are mere tactics in the absence of strategy. Our lives and wellbeing depend on engineering. Only with cohesive, joined-up strategies like these can the real benefit for the UK of this new prize be realised. Stephen Tetlow Chief executive, Institution of Mechanical Engineers