The first time I visited Hitachi’s Durham factory I was being shown around a soon to be completed train by the senior management team, and a fitter came over and asked.
“Boss, is there any news on the new contracts?”
He’d worked there since train production came to Newton Aycliffe, and he knew his livelihood depended on it.
Like every Hitachi worker I met then and since, he was desperate for these jobs to be saved.
I’ve been back to the factory many times since then and discussed the campaign to save jobs with staff and managers – and what always comes across first is pride.
These are solid jobs, good jobs. I know that because workers there tell me they would love to see their children grow up to have a job here.
Making things is in our blood in the North East, it is intrinsically linked to our identity. And I want to be the mayor who creates more of the manufacturing jobs that define our future.
But to do that we need to save the jobs we already have.
We saw in Teesside the historic end of steel production, and now we face the end of train production in the region that gave the world the railway, a loss made all the worse by the fact it only just returned as a result of campaigning from across our region.
Last week Rishi Sunak came to the North East and was asked about Hitachi’s fate. He gave an oddly cold answer that said new production contracts could come one day.
Perhaps he had not read his briefing notes, because the immediate solution the workers at the factory need is not a new contract-bidding process many months from now.
Jobs could be saved
Their jobs could be saved, today, in the time it takes to send an email. All the Prime Minister has to do is ask his Transport Secretary to use a provision in the existing train production contract and extend the work at Hitachi.
It’s that simple. It’s legal, it’s built into the existing contract.
On my most recent visit to the Hitachi factory I joined Labour’s shadow Chancellor Rachel Reeves when she told workers the factory could be saved “with the stroke of a pen” and that she will practise what she preaches if she is chancellor after the General Election.
If the conditions are right we can keep train production in Durham, but the truth is we need this government to act now, not pin our hopes on a future rescue package.
750 workers are directly dependent upon government ministers taking the right decision, with another 1,400 linked to these.
Even these figures don’t sum up the real cost if government inaction closes this factory.
If we lose this factory, where does the teenager growing up in Newton Aycliffe go if they want a job built on their parents labour, on our shared regional heritage?
Train production is a Durham legacy industry. A proud legacy. The fact it returned after such a widely backed campaign, the fight we all united behind, shows how our unique northern identity runs through so much of how we are and what we do in the North East.
To close this factory would not just be an act of economic sabotage. It would be a direct admission by this g overnment that our northern identity simply is not considered an asset worth protecting.
I’m proud to be part of the new campaigning fighting to save these jobs and I hope as mayor to do more for those workers.
