|
Good morning ladies and gentlemen. I am delighted to be here to open
Europe's leading fine and speciality chemicals event, hosted here in
Manchester, North West England, home of one of the UK's main chemical
clusters.
Firstly, let me say how important the chemicals industry is to
Government. 170,000 people are directly employed in the industry and
several hundred thousand more indirectly. £26 billion pounds worth of
chemical products are manufactured in Britain every year and more than
three quarters is exported. The chemicals industry is also promoting
innovation across our wider economy with speciality chemical companies
providing leading-edge science to industry, new materials for
engineering, electronics and opto-electronics and life science products
for health and food production.
To help us create the best possible conditions for the industry, we
set up in January 2002 the chemicals 'Innovation and Growth Team', which
reported back in December 2002. The report identified the opportunities
and challenges facing the industry and made recommendations on how the
industry and Government should tackle them together.
The main message from the report was the need for leadership by the
industry, which led to the establishment of the Chemicals Leadership
Council, chaired by Barry Stickings of BASF. The Council is tackling
major issues facing the industry on reputation and skills, as well as
helping to maintain the high level of innovation, and links to the
science and engineering base which are so critical to industry, and for
which the Chemicals industry is justifiably renowned.
Finally, and perhaps the most fundamental challenge we are facing
together with the industry, is the new European chemicals strategy and
we need to ensure that we respond appropriately to that challenge.
The Government supports the overall objectives of the EU chemical
strategy. However, we have recently seen the draft legislation, and it
is clear that there is a great deal of work required to get that right.
It is a very lengthy and complex piece of legislation. We would like to
see a streamlined system in place - one that stimulates innovation and
avoids over-burdening industry with additional bureaucracy, costs and
delays.
Innovation is critical to the success of British business and wealth
creation in the knowledge driven economy. Government, industry and
higher education institutions, need to work in collaboration to create
the best possible conditions for innovation in industry, to put
innovation at the centre of corporate strategies, and to convey to young
people the excitement and challenges of the advances taking place today
in science and technology, and in this spirit, I would like to declare
this event open.
|
