Sir Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves watch a robot at work during a visit to the Manufacturing Technology Centre - Danny Lawson/PA
The 200 staff at ASD Lighting have been manufacturing lights for airports, hospitals and offices at the company’s Rotherham factory for 40 years, but in 2018 a couple of new hands showed up.
Robbie and Roberta, two robotic arms, joined the production line, fixing screws and placing panels on street lights. ASD says the robots handle the most repetitive tasks, allowing it to improve production rates without replacing staff and reducing the risk of injuries such as RSI.
Universal Robots, the Dutch company that manufactures the arms, says they cost around £33,000. “If you look at that, as opposed to employing a person to do a task, you can see that you’re going to get paid back quite quickly, within maybe a year” says Mark Gray, the company’s UK and Ireland manager.
According to figures from the International Federation of Robotics (IFR), Britain had around 24,445 industrial robots in service in 2021, or 111 for every 10,000 manufacturing workers. That has almost doubled in a decade, but is well behind international peers. The UK is 24th in the world, the lowest in the G7 and below the global average of 141.
In comparison, the US has 274 robots per 10,000 workers, Germany 397, and South Korea 1,000.
The IFR’s annual update last year remarked that “The United Kingdom has a strong manufacturing industry that has surprisingly low annual robot installation counts”, with figures that are “very low for a Western European country”.
The UK is gradually falling further behind, too. Globally, annual installations of industrial robots more than trebled between 2011 and 2021. In the UK they rose just 36pc. Installations have actually fallen since the two biggest years, 2012 and 2013.
The shortfall is seen as part of the explanation for Britain’s flatlining productivity levels and its industrial struggles. Figures last week indicated that the manufacturing sector was shrinking at its fastest rate for more than three years. According to the Office for National Statistics, Britain was the only country last year to see a fall in productivity.
“We’re one of the least productive of the G7 countries,” says Gray. “If you look at the three countries with the biggest productivity, you’ve got South Korea, Japan, and Germany, those three are the most densely populated countries with robots in the world.”
Robots are defined as programmable mechanisms, generally with joints and some kind of arm, in comparison to mere industrial machinery. They can generally be repurposed for different tasks, making them more of an alternative to human labour than other equipment, and are used for tasks such as welding, laser cutting and painting.
Half of today’s stock is in the car making business, followed by chemical products, metals and food and beverage manufacturing.
Peter Williamson, the chief executive of machinery industry body the PPMA, says Britain has historically been more resistant to robots than other countries. They first began to appear in the 1970s and 1980s, when industrial disputes reached a fever pitch.
“There’s a real perception in the UK that robots take jobs. And, you know, That’s something that has prevailed since the Seventies, when a lot of the car manufacturers in the UK didn’t adopt robotics because they didn’t want to upset or demotivate their workforce. The whole robotic industrial revolution that happened in the Seventies and Eighties in other parts of the world didn’t happen here.”
Experts say the major reason that Britain has been more resistant to robots, however, is an addiction to cheap workers. “We continued to think that low cost labour was the way forward, rather than actually adopting automation,” says Williamson. “So there’s a hangover from that.”
Governments have repeatedly identified low levels of robotics in the UK as a problem. In 2013, the Coalition science minister David Willetts listed it as one of the “eight great technologies” it hoped would drive growth in the next decade.
Earlier this year, Lord Willetts, now a life peer, revisited the technologies, and conceded that demographics had held back investment. The return of labour intensive hand car washes at the expense of automated alternatives is one example outside manufacturing.
Robots were highlighted in the Government’s 2017 industrial strategy, and in 2021 a taxpayer-commissioned report said adoption could add £6.4bn to economic output.
But it is the labour shock created by Brexit that is most likely to increase investment. Rishi Sunak has called for more investment in robotics in areas such as the NHS and social care to manage long term staffing issues.
The IFR said that “robotic automation might compensate for the increasing shortage of low-wage labour while allowing the country to remain competitive”.
Gray, of Universal Robotics, says: “We’ve seen the biggest upturn in our business in the two years since Brexit. We’ve got an ageing workforce – the average age of a welder now is 55. They’ve got 10 years before they retire. And we can’t replace that skill with young people quick enough. So we are seeing that turnaround. People are more open to robotics and automation.”
