Edward Morello, MP, visits Brotherwood Automobility

Recently, we welcomed our local Liberal Democrat MP, Edward Morello, to our factory in Dorset.  The visit gave us the opportunity to exchange our views and objectives regarding the challenges and opportunities we are currently facing as a business and how we can work together to address these. 

Like many businesses, we face an ever-changing set of challenges; political, environmental, social and economic influences all present their own set of obstacles. We must work with these challenges and through growth, adaptation and innovation continue to run a successful business.

We proudly undertook a tour of our factory with Edward to highlight the work that we do and to offer a greater understanding of the extensive processes involved in vehicle conversion within the WAV industry.  Talking through how we convert a vehicle into a WAV and the different considerations that go into the design emphasised the diversity of roles and skills required to manufacture a completed vehicle.

During the tour, we discussed the opportunity that Made in Britain offers, and what Brotherwood aims to achieve with being part of this membership; promoting British manufacturing.  As part of our commitment to British manufacturing, we also discussed the need to nurture future talent and how we can do this through Apprenticeship schemes and other routes. Provoking questions such as how we can attract more talent into the industry and who can we work with to do this.  Training comes at a cost, before it is a benefit to most businesses and understanding the assistance that may be available is needed.

There are many pressures affecting business such as ours today; cost increases including NI, Living Wage, energy and material costs were also highlighted and how these pressures make it increasingly difficult to remain competitive within our market.  We produce our vehicles to the highest standards and is not something we compromise on, but rising costs makes this increasingly more challenging.  This coupled with increasing imports with lesser standards to ours, can be disheartening, as we endeavour to promote British manufacturing and high production standards.

For the WAV industry specifically, the ZEV Mandate is a particular focus, it’s a challenge and an opportunity.  The opportunity to reduce emissions through EV powered vehicles is welcome, however it comes as a challenge for WAV converters to do this right.  With the current battery locations on electric vehicles, converters are limited to the possibilities of space and layout within the vehicle.  Our ethos is to provide high-quality vehicles that provide the wheelchair user with ultimate space and comfort, this is a challenge to provide in an electric vehicle.  Is rural Dorset even set up to accommodate the number of EVs set by the mandate? More time and resources are needed to develop EVs or WAVs and the charging infrastructure behind them especially in a rural location such as ours.

We also discussed local issues such as the yearly flooding in our area which is a particular concern to our business. Each year, the main access routes to our factory are closed off by flooding.  Causing issues with deliveries to and from the factory but most importantly makes is challenging for employees to safely travel to the factory so we can retain production schedules and ensure deadlines are upheld.  This is a recurring issue, and we need to be prepared, however with climates becoming more unpredictable, and the current El Nino weather phenomenon looking to last until February we could be set for exceptional storms and wet weather.  Although it’s reassuring to hear that this matter is already being discussed, we hope that this will be addressed in time and look forward to being made aware of what will be done about this.

With a new PM now in office, there is always a sense of uncertainty as to the potential changes that a new power will bring and how this could impact our markets, our business and our employees in terms of rates, policies and legislation changes. We hope that any changes that come will enable us to continue to grow a successful business, sustain and promote British manufacturing and provide the markets leading wheelchair accessible vehicles for many years to come.

We’d like to thank Edward Morello, MP, for taking the time out of his busy schedule to meet with our Managing Director, John Daniel and Finance Director, Dale Worthington, we hope the visit was insightful and the views of a Dorset manufacturing business can be heard.  It was particularly beneficial for us to understand that some of our concerns are already being considered and to have the opportunity to voice our views on other matters. We’re hopeful that together progress can be made to address some of these issues faced by Dorset businesses today.