On first impressions, Rayne Precision Engineering is a neat little company. Tucked into the hills of the southern fringe of the Peak District, it consists of four solid modern sheds, built of a fake stone material that blends in with the local housing. These are arranged around a tidy yard next to a mobile hut that serves as office accommodation. The atmosphere in the yard is pleasantly quiet. There’s a faint hum in the air, but none of the clashing or screeching of metal on metal that you might expect.
It quickly becomes apparent that there is a reason for this. The company’s founder and managing director, Andrew Simmill, leads me into first one shed and then another to show me an array of laser-cutting and welding machinery, all of it standing idle. The signs of recent activity are all around – a scattering of little metal shavings; a neat pile of ring-shaped components bound for the automotive industry. Today the firm is having a shutdown, Simmill explains.
In the summer of 1997, Rayne Engineering, which is a few miles outside the market town of Leek, had 47 full-time staff, working five days and sometimes nights or Saturday mornings as well, making parts for JCB, GKN and a range of other engineering companies. Simmill bought a people-carrier so that his welders could drive in from Stoke-on-Trent, 20 minutes or so down the road. He had diversified, too, into making shopfitting parts for Waterstone’s.
The crash, when it came, came fast. In April this year Simmill took on a salesman to try to boost a flagging order book, but to no avail. Now Rayne Precision is down to 26 staff working four days a week. There have been 12 compulsory redundancies. The remaining staff agreed to their hours being cut from 39 to 31 last week.
“Last week was my worst week,” Simmill says. “We had to let six people go. You’re looking people in the eye just before Christmas . . . these are people with families and mortgages. And there’s nothing I can do – I’ve got to protect the business.”
Simmill is a big, weather-beaten man in blue overalls and a sweatshirt. He looks out of place in the firm’s meeting room, under the glossy banners he ordered so they could push for scarce orders at trade fairs. He looks as if he could shoulder quite a burden – and that is exactly what he is having to do now.
“Carol, who does the stores and the planning, came to me last week and said, ‘I’ll take redundancy, Andrew.’ She’s over 60. She didn’t want a younger person with a family to lose their job. But she’s a key part of the business. I don’t mind admitting I’ve had sleepless nights about finding enough work for my men.”
This little local heartache is solid evidence of the tectonic shift that has affected businesses across the world in recent months. The plummeting housing market, the struggling construction industry, banks cracking under the weight of bad mortgage debts and overextended credit, all lead here to this little office.
For Simmill it trickled down in part from JCB, which dominates the heavy industry in this area, previously employing 5,000 at its plants in Rocester, Uttoxeter and Cheadle. The digger manufacturer – for whom Simmill has nothing but praise – was forced to cut production by a third and to make nearly 600 staff redundant this autumn as orders, even from previously buoyant markets such as Russia, began to dry up.
In the nearby Potteries, there have been 350 job losses at Wedgwood and Spode has gone into administration, putting a further 150 at risk. The misery goes on, the figures stacking up in tens here, twenties there. On the day of my visit the front page of the Sentinel, Stoke’s local paper, carried the news that Hinks Fine China, the UK’s last china flower manufacturer, was to close with the loss of another 16 jobs. At Uttoxeter, Dairy Farmers of Britain announced it was closing its Fole Dairy with 250 to go. At Phones4u, another major Staffordshire company, 240 IT jobs were reported to be at risk. Simmill (“I’m 47 but I feel 67,” he says, then laughs) has been here before. Twenty years ago he started an engineering business with his father during the tail end of the 1980s boom.
“Nineteen eighty-nine was an extremely good year, but 1990 . . .” he pauses for a moment. “I was financed up to the hilt. I had £70,000 debt on one machine. Then I had 12 months where my father died of cancer and my brother was killed in a road accident at 23.
People are buying cheaper cuts of meat rather than the high-end products on sale
“Everything came at once. I got married, my daughter Carly was born, and two weeks later the company went into receivership. I had finance people chasing me; my house was on the line. I was on the verge of being made bankrupt.”
But Simmill doesn’t give up easily. For a year he worked for the man who bought his business, then rented his machines. “It was just 12 months after I went down,” he says. “The banks and accountants hadn’t had any faith in me, and it was almost to prove them wrong. I’m a determined sort of fellow.”
He and his wife Clare now have three daughters – Carly, 17, Sheri, 16, and Kate, 13 – and they never stop hearing about the evils of credit. “I was out shopping one time with Sheri when she was only four or five,” recalls Simmill. “I ran out of cash and so I thought, ‘I’ll wait until next week.’ She turned to me and said, ‘Put it on your card, Dad.’ I was really taken aback by that, and I thought about it a lot. What I’m fearful of is my children going through what I went through. There are too many credit cards, too much easily available credit. That’s put us in this mess.”
About 18 months ago this niggling worry turned into a family crusade. Sitting around the table outside their house one summer evening over a meal, they began drawing out a game on sheets of A4 paper. Then the girls got busy with clip art and a boardgame, Credit 4 Life, was born. Players start with £1,500 and on a throw of the dice they pay bills – mortgage £600; night out £50; credit card 30 per cent debit interest – and, if they are lucky, draw wages. The game, now in a smart box with a laminated board, has been sold to about 20 schools and is being supported by Caudwell Children, a charity funded by John Caudwell, the local Phones4u tycoon.
Simmill says he talks to his children about the problems his business is facing, and after school they often come to see him at work instead of going home. But he has no plans to bring them into the family firm. “I’m not being sexist, but I think manufacturing is a hard game,” he says. “If the government doesn’t believe in it there won’t be any manufacturing here in ten years.”
As you drive into Leek along the Ashbourne Road, the signs of economic gloom are easy to spot. A 19th-century mill stands with its glass grimed and a board outside advertises a small business within. Further into town the White Lion and Talbot pubs are both boarded up. The Leek Post and Times has a picture of Gary Clewlow of GJ’s Greengrocers holding a sign saying “Closing Down (sorry)”, over the headline: “Shoppers urged to stay local as credit crunch bites hard”. Clewlow tells the paper he cannot compete with Aldi.
To be fair, the former textile town, which weathered the decline of the silk industry in the late 19th century and the globalisation of synthetic fabrics in the 20th, is not completely down at heel. Its market square is wide and cobbled, and a queue of shoppers is keeping its well-stocked fruit and veg stall busy. There’s a half-timbered Marston’s pub, the Bird in Hand, flanked by Cancer Research and Oxfam shops.
Businesses such as Simmill’s are at the sharp end of the recession, and others in the area are less gloomy about the future. Off the A523 between Simmill’s works at Ipstones and the town of Leek, signs point to enterprises with a more rural flavour: Beaver Hall Equestrian Centre, Middle Farm Bed and Breakfast. Down a long track, Janet Phillips runs the Threshing Barn, a small shop selling craft supplies and meat reared on the farm she runs with her husband, Dave.
Phillips says she always has a pot of coffee on the go in her shop, which is packed to the rafters with skeins of brightly coloured wool, Christmas wreaths and knitwear; it helps to make the place feel welcoming, she says. The craft workshops she runs – a launching pad for sales of equipment and materials – had their best October ever, she says. But the meat is doing less well. People are buying cheaper cuts rather than the high-end products they sell here.
“I think long-established businesses will survive, but January and February are going to be grim,” says Phillips. “From December, we would usually expect big orders, and they’re not coming in. I don’t think people are going to go for the big items this year.”
On Derby Street, a Butters John Bee estate agent stands with property details in its windows and a To Let sign above its door. At first glance the business seems to be occupied, but a closer look reveals too-neat desks with phones and notepads and nothing else, and a notice on the door confirms, “Please note: This office is now closed. We will continue to provide our services from our Hanley and Congleton offices.” Just a few doors along, the Ponden Mill shop also bears a To Let sign and big banners announcing, “Twenty Per Cent Off – Everything Must Go”, though an assistant says she doesn’t know whether they’re going to close.
Round the corner, near the now-defunct GJ’s Greengrocers, is Photoprint, founded nearly 30 years ago by Brian Johnson, now the town’s mayor and president of its chamber of trade and commerce. His assessment of the situation is relatively upbeat, and he attributes several of the town’s business failures to a lack of initiative or staying power. Despite having spent half a million pounds on opening a horse livery last year and carrying a lot of debt (“You don’t want to know,” he says when I ask how much), he is investing £20,000 in a digital colour printing machine, which would have cost him £34,000 in normal times.
“You’ll often hear people saying, ‘Leek’s always in recession – what difference does it make?'” he says. “People round here have been used to tightening their belts.
“But the new businesses have never had to face this before. They don’t make allowances, they don’t think ahead far enough. People will have to promote their businesses – they’ll have to think positive.”
Others in the town are struggling to follow his advice. Looking for the Diva shoe shop which, according to the local paper, is to close after Christmas, I stop to ask directions from a couple huddled against the cold and carrying a plastic bag of meat bones. They cheerfully offer to show me the place and as we walk along together the man, David, tells me he has been out of work for the past six months, after being laid off by a firm that makes parts for car exhausts.
“My old boss closed the doors,” he says. “I’d take anything, but if you put on your CV that you were in engineering, they think you don’t want a menial job. They think you’ll take off as soon as something better comes – and I would as well.
“JCB has a massive effect on this area. Last year employees had a £1,000 Christmas bonus, but this year they’ll be lucky if they get anything. I’ve given up.”
He asks if I’m going for a job interview. I tell him no, I’m writing an article about the credit crunch for a magazine. “Well,” he says without a trace of rancour, “at least someone’s making money out of it.”
Fran Abrams is the author of “Below the Breadline: Living on the Minimum Wage”, published by Profile Books (£6.99)
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