Tony Osborne

There is a mill on the Dove at Rocester in Staffordshire, an eighteenth-century Arkwright mill from the years when this country was inventing the factory as we know it. It spun cotton for two hundred years and then following its decommission it stood empty and waited to be turned into apartments. In 2010 it opened as a school. Anthony Bamford turned Arkwright's mill into an engineering academy for fourteen to nineteen year olds, a £20 million conversion, with Toyota and Bosch and Fujitsu putting their own engineers into the classrooms. It is now the most oversubscribed school in the county. Ask yourself why a digger company had to build a school. It had to build a school because the British state, presented with the plainest industrial problem in the country, produced the Apprenticeship Levy. Since it came in, apprenticeship starts have fallen 31 per cent. Starts in small businesses have fallen 49 per cent. Level 2 starts, the ones that take a sixteen-year-old with nothing and make him employable, have fallen 72 per cent. Employer spending on training is down 36 per cent a head in real terms since 2005, forty-two per cent of manufacturing vacancies go unfilled because the qualified people do not exist, and the shortage costs us somewhere between thirty and thirty-nine billion pounds a year in output that simply never happens. So Bamford stopped waiting and made his own. This month the engineers that mill helped produce are taking a car to the Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah. It is called the Hydromax, it is ten metres long, and it runs on two hydrogen internal combustion engines that JCB designed and built itself, sixteen hundred horsepower between them. Andy Green is driving. That is a lovely piece of symmetry, because Green set the diesel land speed record twenty years ago this month, in a JCB, at 350.092 miles per hour. Same firm, same driver, back on the same salt. The hydrogen combustion record stands at 187 miles per hour. Hydromax has already done 208 in testing on British ground. They are going for something past 350. Of course, our national conversation about engines has been conducted for a decade by people who have never made one. Whitehall decided that the combustion engine was finished and that the future would arrive procured from China. A family firm in Staffordshire declined the memo and rejected the underpinning philosophy, then spent its own money for years to build a hydrogen engine that eleven European licensing authorities have now certified for sale, and is about to drive it across a salt flat faster than anything of its kind has ever moved. The state's only contribution to this superb endeavour was a levy that cut apprenticeships by a third. Progress will abolish the Apprenticeship Levy outright and put the Skill Capital Levy in its place, hypothecated entirely to training, three quarters of it locked to Levels 2 and 3 where the actual work of the country is done, with a £5k tax credit for any employer who takes a worker beyond the statutory minimum. We will let young people start earning nationally recognised Hallmarks at fifteen, so that a kid can walk out at eighteen with three of them locked and loaded and ready to go, no debt, and a trade that pays. Imagine a hundred Rocesters. Imagine every decent-sized town with a firm that serious and a school that good sitting in the middle of it, and a generation coming out at eighteen who can build things that move. Germany does this. Switzerland does this. We did it ourselves within living memory, and there is not one law of physics standing between us and doing it again; doing it even better than it has ever been done before! Anthony Bamford had to do it alone because nobody in Whitehall was ever going to help him. We mean to change this country so that the next man like him doesn't have to. Good luck at Bonneville.