£4m Bridgnorth training centre officially opened

Manufacturing bosses say they are experiencing a boom at present, but Shropshire has a long-standing skills gap in the sector.

Now the Marches Centre for Manufacturing & Technology has opened its doors, and was unveiled by Ludlow MP Philip Dunne in front of 250 invited dignitaries on Friday morning.

"This is a really exciting moment for Bridgnorth and Shropshire as a whole," Mr Dunne said.

"This is an outstanding example of private and public sector cooperation to give skills training opportunities to young people in Shropshire and the West Midlands.

"It will skills them up for the engineering jobs of the future, and help employers locally to recruit locally.

"Manufacturing is showing a bit of a resurgence at the moment, and growth figures in the last quarter were up one per cent. We need to remain at the forefront of engineering excellence, and we now have this asset in Bridgnorth."

The centre is run by a consortium comprising Bridgnorth engineering companies Classic Motor Cars and Grainger & Worrall, plus Shrewsbury manufacturer Salop Design & Engineering and training provider In-Comm, which also runs Salop's apprentice academy in the county town.

The new 36,000 sq ft facility in Bridgnorth has opened in one of automotive castings specialist Grainger & Worrall's old storage sheds, and has now been fitted out as a state-of-the-art training centre, with areas covering industry techniques such as milling, fabrication, lathes, a foundry, robotics, vehicle trimming and metrology, or precision measurement.

It also includes a 200-seat auditorium, classrooms, and a zone dedicated to CNC machines.

It has received £1.9 million of Government funding via the Marches Local Enterprise Partnership, backing from Shropshire Council, and has been fitted with more than £2 million of equipment.

Matthew Snelson, the centre's managing director, said: "Today is a celebration of how a consortium of different businesses, shareholders and stakeholder can work together to deliver something pretty significant for the region in terms of economic growth, and to do it pretty quickly.

"We are not replacing what colleges do, we are adding higher level skills that we need as employers.

"We have already got some smaller businesses that never had apprentices taking them on. We want employers to move together in terms of bringing higher level skills into their businesses."

He added: "Manufacturing is booming in the region across different sectors, from vehicles right the way through to engineering, castings, stamping, machining. There's a lot of good news stories – the growth of JLR, and Grainger & Worrall do a lot of work prototyping for next generation engines. There's huge opportunities."

James Grainger of Grainger & Worrall, one of the county's biggest private-sector employers, added: "We have had a skills gap, that's well documented. As the industry recovered after the 2010 recession and growth was coming and JLR came in we were training but people were pinching from us as well.

"The Apprenticeship Levy is great, that's a nationwide thing and hopefully we are all training and putting back into the industry.

"This facility is a coming together of the council, the LEP and businesses to say we have a real need here. Individually none of us could have achieved something of this scale in this time frame."

Lauren Ball, 17, is part of the first cohort to join the Marches Centre of Manufacturing & Technology as part of her quality engineer apprenticeship with Caterpillar in Shrewsbury, and is one of a growing band of female engineers that Mr Snelson said would be crucial to the future of industry.

The former Hadley Learning Community pupil added: “Within a few weeks of getting my GCSEs I’d secured a job at Caterpillar and this involved me completing my apprenticeship at the MCMT. Dad and I drove down to have a look around and I was amazed at the facilities, the scale of the technology and how it could help me in my career."