Sir, I worked for Coventry City Council through the 1960s and early 1970s and met leaders of the motor industry regularly regarding their development proposals for the city. While they wished to expand operations, these were prevented by the regional policies of government. At the time there was a strong network of inter-related companies of all sizes supplying the motor industry, which were concentrated in the Birmingham-Coventry-Oxford triangle.

The remoteness of development in other regions imposed extra costs on the industry, reducing its competitiveness. Rootes had to expand in Scotland and this resulted in overnight trains between Coventry and the new Scottish operations daily. The company was already split between the Midlands and Bedfordshire and meetings we had with their directors required them to travel from all over the country. The takeover by Chrysler only introduced an additional level of directors who would appear at the end of our meetings to review the decisions of their British board. Such was the effect of foreign ownership on this formerly British company and little wonder that it failed to survive.

Standard Triumph was forced to develop on Merseyside and had similar problems moving materials between there and the West Midlands. It opted to operate a large fleet of lorries between the two regions. This may have been the cheaper solution but was still very costly not only to its production but to the community in environmental terms.

Jaguar only escaped similar dispersal by buying the operations of Daimler in the city. Instead of being able to provide new state-of-the-art facilities at Browns Lane it had instead to occupy old buildings in another part of the city with all the shortcomings that this brought.

It was not only the big names that lost but all the related suppliers, as well as the British taxpayer who had to pay towards dispersal and the eventual collapse of the British-owned industry.

JOHN HAWKINS
Colchester

Sir, Ray Simons (letter, April 22) suggests that governments should have encouraged people to have pride in our car industry and to choose to buy British.

I disagree: pride and loyalty are no substitute for quality. Blind loyalty to British brands created a soft market and a gave a false sense of security. If more motorists had been sufficiently discerning to recognise the advances being made by competitors and had bought elsewhere in the 1960s, British manufacturers might have realised that quality was slipping when there was still time to do something about it.

Governments could certainly have done more to create the conditions that would have encouraged production of quality products. Pride in, and choice of, British cars would then have followed automatically.

JIM WHYMAN
Taunton

Sir, There is something endearingly British about one branch of government urging us to give up cars and walk, cycle or travel by bus and another branch lamenting a reduction in car manufacture in the UK and offering, as consolation, the statistic that we are still making cars at near-record production levels.

DR W. S. AFFLECK
Stroud, Glos

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