NO one is yet seriously suggesting that the Hitachi factory at Newton Aycliffe is under threat, but its difficulties do suggest the crisis in Britain’s rail industry.

Hitachi now believes the Aycliffe factory is worth £65m less because the rail industry is shrinking. The Alstom plant in Derby is in a much worse predicament: it has no work for the new year, and so 550 jobs are likely to go along with the orders that support 780 contractors.

These factories are hugely expensive, and time consuming, to get up and running in the first place, as the battle to secure Aycliffe showed a decade ago, and if you allow the specialist contractors to fade away, you will struggle to restart the factories even when the UK government does want to order trains. Then, Britain will have to buy abroad.

The rail industry has been changed dramatically by the pandemic, but we will need trains in the near future for the Trans-Pennine route and for whatever emerges of “Northern Powerhouse rail”.

We have seen the same lack of strategy in the steel industry, where we close our home plants and buy from China; you can even see it in the energy sector, where we close our coal-fired plants and buy gas from Europe, even Russia, without having a strategy to get homegrown renewables or nuclear plants fully online.

Surely we should organise our huge and vital industries so that they understand what the government wants from them, and we have an organised process that allows contracts to keep British factories, employing British people, ticking over so we don’t have to get everything from overseas.

Our government and our MPs are currently spending all their time, and £300m of public money, arguing over sending a couple of hundred illegal migrants to Rwanda when they should be devoting the same resources to keep our homegrown rail industry on track.

READ THE FULL STORY OF HITACHI'S £65m "IMPAIRMENT" AT AYCLIFFE