LONDON BRIEFING:The news of 1,400 job losses at Bombardier's train-making plant is bad timing for the British government

THE TIMING could hardly be worse: as British business secretary Vince Cable today unveils his “Made by Britain” project, intended as a “celebration” of the nation’s manufacturing sector, the headlines scream of the 1,400 jobs being axed at Britain’s sole surviving train-making plant.

Almost half the workforce at the Bombardier factory in Derby are to lose their jobs following the firm’s failure to secure a £3 billion (€3.33 billion) contract to manufacture 1,200 train carriages for the Thameslink rail route across London. Instead, the work is going to the Siemens group in Germany.

Governments cannot generally be held responsible when employers fail to secure crucial contracts – except in this case. It was the government that last month awarded the business to the German firm in preference to Bombardier, sealing the fate of the 1,400 workers in Derby, where the company has been manufacturing trains for more than 150 years.

The impact will be felt far beyond Bombardier’s Litchurch Lane plant, which has no work beyond 2014 and where just one of five productions lines will be left in operation by the autumn, producing metro cars for the London underground system.

As many as 12,000 people are estimated to be employed in the supply chain in and around Derby and their prospects too look bleak. Locally, they fear it could take a generation for the city to recover.

Unions reacted with fury, demanding that the government reverse its decision. For Britain’s General Union, it was “the ultimate in stupidity as UK taxpayers’ funds are to be used to pay for train sets to be manufactured in Germany as train-building workers are being made jobless in the UK”.

Bob Crow of the National Union of Rail, Maritime and Transport Workers slammed it as “industrial vandalism”, while another union leader said no French or German government would have awarded such a vital contract to an overseas manufacturer.

British transport secretary Philip Hammond insisted the government had no choice but to award the work to the bidder with the highest value-for-money bid – and that it was the Labour administration that had stipulated those rules back in 2008 at the start of the process. Hammond also claimed that Bombardier would have axed jobs whether or not it had won the work.

There may be some truth in that, but the contract would have secured the future for a few years at least of most of the 1,400 workers now facing a bleak search for alternative employment. It would also have staved off a wider review of the group’s operations in the UK, which could well see further cuts in the months ahead.

There was real anger among Bombardier’s management, particularly as the Canadian- owned group had maintained its presence in Derby in recent years partly because it believed it would be easier to win UK contracts with a UK manufacturing base.

Cable responded to the furore with the announcement that he is setting up an economic response taskforce to mitigate the impact of the job losses and that the government would look at how similar contracts are handled in future.

Today, Cable will be banging the drum for British manufacturing at the unveiling of Made by Britain, billed as a “virtual Crystal Palace” (the site of the Great Exhibition in 1851). It is designed to showcase the best of Britain’s manufacturers, with each of the 650 MPs choosing one company in their constituency to include in the project. For one MP – the honourable member for Derby North – that choice got a little harder yesterday.

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WHAT AREwe to make of the decision of Tom Drury to quit his job as chief executive of waste management firm Shanks because he wants to work closer to home?

Home happens to be in Knutsford, Cheshire, while the Shanks head office is in Milton Keynes. It’s a journey of about 177km (110 miles), but the £840,000-a-year Drury says that, after four years, he can’t face driving up and down the M6 any more.

His candour in admitting this is “a lifestyle decision” is admirable, although 177km doesn’t seem a particularly onerous journey, especially as he only does it twice a week, travelling to Milton Keynes on Monday mornings and going back up north on Friday evenings. Being apart from the family is tough, of course, but he could have let the train take the strain or perhaps even considered moving them to Milton Keynes.

Announcing his chief executive’s departure, Shanks chairman Adrian Auer was extremely understanding; he respected Drury’s decision and thanked him for his hard work over the years. But as the search gets under way for a replacement, I imagine the board will be taking a keen interest in where their new chief executive lives.

Fiona Walsh writes for the Guardiannewspaper in London