Friday Brief (17/05/2024) W20

Good afternoon and welcome to this weeks Friday Brief. Well, it looks like the weather has brightened up again just in time for the weekend!

To kick things off this week there have been changes to claims and contracted relief set to impact UK manufacturing. According to HMRC’s 2023 ‘R&D Tax Credit Statistics’ manufacturing conducts 41% of all UK R&D, claims 23% of R&D tax credit and invests in the area more than any other industry. Check out the story below with a link to the full story.

Sami Ortiz has another BSI standard for you to comment on. The proposal reads – Robotics — Test methods for measuring the energy consumption of robots — 6-Axis articulated industrial robots. Read the scope and purpose below and make your comments today.

Our headline economic news this week was our Spring Update Event at which we released the updated forecasts for the UK machine tool and cutting tool markets. The event featured a presentation on the macro-economic background from Andy Goodwin, Chief UK Economist at Oxford Economics, with Geoff Noon (MTA Statistician) adding the industrial flavour to the mixture that produces our updated forecasts. We highlight these presentations in the article below – this includes the link you will need to download the latest documents and presentations; these are available to all members but only to you, irrespective of whether you attended the Update Event or not.

We have two separate economic news articles this week. The UK piece covers the latest figures for investment and trade which are the final elements of the quarterly data which was published last Friday; for Europe, we have the March figures for industrial production and an update on the estimate of GDP for Q1-24.

Finally, for those companies who exhibited at MACH, the follow-up survey is still open for your input. This is an important source of feedback, good or bad, on the exhibition that helps us in making the next edition even better and we would be grateful if you could take time to complete the survey. The form for this is online at www.mta.org.uk/MACH2024-exhibitors-survey.

Those are all the stories we have for this week; we hope you all have wonderful weekends and look forward to ‘seeing’ you again next week.

ECONOMIC NEWS – EUROPE

European Industrial Production, March 2024: The latest monthly data from Eurostat shows that, compared to February, total industrial production (IP) grew by +0.2% for the EU but by +0.6% for the sub-set which is the Euro-zone countries. Looking back 12 months to March 2023, total IP grew by +1.0% for both the EU and the […]

ECONOMIC NEWS – UK

UK Business Investment, 1st Quarter 2024: One of the other data series that came out at the end of last week but which we did not have time to report was for business investment. Unfortunately, we will have to wait for the National Accounts data at the end of June for the industry level breakdown, […]

MTA SPRING ECONOMIC UPDATE

At our Spring Economic Update event this week, members heard about the latest economic outlook for the UK economy (and a bit about the rest of the world), as well as the industrial picture on the same basis, with an update of our forecasts for the UK machine tool and cutting tool markets. This is […]

BSI – ISO/NP TS 25213 -Link to New Work Item Proposal

Please be advised that a New Work Item Proposal has been loaded to the BSI Standards Development Portal for comment. Any comments received will be submitted to the national committee AMT/10 – “Robotics” for consideration when deciding the UK response to the associated Standards Development Organisation. Proposal: ISO/NP TS 25213 – Robotics — Test methods […]

Changes to claims and contracted relief set to impact UK manufacturing

Changes to claims and contracted relief set to impact UK manufacturing Robin Taylor, Senior Sector Specialist at MTA Associate Member, ForrestBrown offers critical advice The UK government has made the most significant changes to tax incentives available for research and development (R&D) since their introduction in 2000, in a move set to impact manufacturing. Announced on the […]

Friday Brief