Solving problems is not something that is unique to engineers; legislation, for example, can be viewed as seeking a solution to a problem.

However, history shows that legislators do not usually adopt the same rigorous, analytical approach that would be the norm for engineers. Having trained and worked as an engineer, then progressed to the board of a car manufacturing group, Malcolm Harbour MEP (Conservative, West Midlands region of the UK) is convinced that better regulation would be created if legislators were to use a model more akin to that found in engineering-based businesses. Pursuing that idea a step further, it can be argued that Europe could also become more competitive in the global market.

But how did this engineer become a company director, a consultant, a researcher and finally a Member of the European Parliament?

“I did a three-year degree in engineering at Cambridge University and was one of four graduate engineers taken on by what was then BMC (British Motor Corporation) at Longbridge. I did my apprenticeship on the shop floor, which was invaluable, as in 1967 Longbridge was a fully integrated car plant, doing just about everything including forging and casting. Then I went to work as a draughtsman on light commercial vehicles, primarily working on chassis designs, and from there I moved into development engineering, where I was the engineer responsible for building the first prototype Sherpa van in the summer of 1972.

“After that I went to Standard Triumph and worked in product planning and business planning for ten years in a variety of jobs, including working on the Maestro and Montego. Then I became business planning director for Austin Rover.

“In 1982 I was approached to see if I would like to become director of marketing – which I did for two years. Then in 1984 I was asked if I would like to run the UK sales operation. In that role I became very interested in how distributors were organised and how dealerships and distribution were managed. In 1986 we had another reorganisation and I was asked if I would like to take over overseas sales and, particularly, if I could build up one or two of our new overseas distribution markets – such as Japan.”

The story so far has not mentioned politics, but Malcolm Harbour’s interests in this field date from his days as a development engineer.

“I had been actively involved in Conservative politics since 1972 and I had been particularly interested in European politics; the European Parliament is still the only directly elected international assembly. I had already helped to run our local 1979 Euro election campaign, then, when the elections were coming up in 1989, it seemed like a good opportunity to become a candidate myself. My bosses at the time were willing to let me stand for election – and even encouraged me. However, by the time of the election, Austin Rover was restructuring again and we mutually – and amicably – agreed that I would leave.”

He continues: “After the election, because I had not won, I was out of a job. I decided then to establish my own consulting company focusing on car marketing and distribution strategy, where I could see there was a gap in the market for experienced consultants. We decided that the industry needed a large-scale international benchmarking project for the whole field of the ‘post-factory system’ – everything that happens after the car leaves the factory. In 1994 we launched the International Car Distribution Programme, which was then and still remains the world’s only true international pan-industry programme in this field. That project has now been running for more than 10 years and has produced a very substantial body of work, all of which is in the public domain.

“In 1998 it was announced that the 1999 European Parliamentary elections would be decided in the UK on the basis of proportional representation. This opened a whole lot of new possibilities for me, and I was elected to the European Parliament in 1999 for my home region, the West Midlands.

“Meanwhile, a very interesting piece of work that I was instrumental in starting with some of my colleagues in 1998 was the Three-Day Car, which was also a public domain project. A lot of work had been done on benchmarking and productivity improvement in our factories, and we had also applied those methods to the distribution chain. What we tried to do with the Three-Day Car project was to put the two together, because one of the problems with a lean distribution chain is that you require a more responsive manufacturing chain. We chose three days as the ultimate lean objective – order, production and delivery to the customer in three days.

“So we formed a consortium and pitched this proposal to the EPSRC (Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council). They agreed to fund half the cost of the three-year project if commercial sponsors funded the other half. The project went on to be very successful, but I was only involved for the first year because I was elected after that.”

Member of the European Parliament

Having finally won a seat, Malcolm Harbour was keen to make use of his skills and experience as soon as possible.

“I arrived in the European Parliament in 1999, a firm believer that politics needs more people with business experience and a science and technology background – there are not many people in politics with an engineering qualification. Crucial decisions are made in Europe that affect manufacturing businesses, and there are significant amounts of product and environmental regulation and other things that impact on entrepreneurial activity – such as intellectual property.

“When you enter the European Parliament you are invited to apply to sit on committees; I decided to go on to the Internal Market Committee, Industry, Research and Energy Committee and Legal Affairs Committee, and I also wanted to get involved with electronic communications and the internet and e-commerce. Although I was not trying to distance myself from the car industry, I did not want to be seen as someone that just knew about cars. Nevertheless, in my first five years I did quite a lot of work on cars and was instrumental in establishing a new stakeholder forum about the car industry, but I was not involved in much legislative work on cars.

“Another thing about the EP is that you can get involved straight away. When I wanted to get involved in the Legal Affairs Committee I went to see my

co-ordinator, the leader of our centre right team. He explained that there was a proposal to do with motor vehicle fuel tanks and, as I knew something about it, he suggested that I took it on – so I became a rapporteur within a matter of days of becoming a Member of the European Parliament.

“Also, partly as a result of my management experience, I worked on the reforms to the staff regulations of the European Commission and European Institutions, which needed a fundamental overhaul to develop a system where staff are appraised and there is a performance-based system of merit.”

Management experience

In addition to his management experience, Malcolm Harbour has also found his engineering background to be invaluable in his work as an MEP.

“First of all, having the right background helps in understanding the concepts behind the technical regulations we discuss. Also my experience in working for a large and complex organisation, and having studied the car industry subsequently, has been a significant benefit. Certainly an analytical approach is exceptionally helpful – I carry with me my corporate planning skills in approaching problems.

“I think a lot of the problems in political life stem from the fact that strategic planning work is not well done. I have been very much involved in ‘better regulation’ and one of the things that struck me is the way that the preparatory work for legislation is generally weak. For a business proposition, you would first of all define the problem with whatever statistics are necessary to quantify it, then you would propose a set of alternative potential solutions to the problem, then you would analyse the impact of those solutions. Then you would choose the best one.

“In politics – particularly in the UK – you rarely see that analytical approach. The European Commission is patchy, but the best people in the Commission have done that reasonably well. As always, and this is something you learn from being in an engineering environment, the more resources and effort that you put in at the time of product concept, design and development, the better the product you will get to market – and more quickly – because you will not have the problems associated with retrospective modifications and feasibility difficulties. Launching legislation is not that different to launching a complex product such as a car.

“Indeed, this is even more so at European level, such as with the Machinery Directive, as the legislation is framework legislation that then has to be implemented by the Member States; the Commission does not necessarily verify with the Member States that they are capable of introducing the new legislation, or whether they have the resources to implement it and are prepared to enforce it. The Commission did not, until recently, tend to get the Member States together so they could share how to do this. The final piece in the jigsaw is that National politicians should be involved in that process.

“More of an ‘engineering’ approach – and indeed, more science and engineering, would be very valuable to politics (Fig.1). Also politicians, in comparison with the general population, tend to be slow adopters of new technology and therefore do not understand the implications of new technologies or how they relate to peoples’ lifestyles and the way they access products. I am a passionate believer in letting the free market work when it comes to technological evolution; if we do need to put in place legislation for public protection, it should prescribe outcomes, not technological solutions.”

One area where Malcolm Harbour got heavily involved was The European Union Directive on the patentability of computer-implemented inventions, which aimed to harmonise EU national patent laws and practices – in particular, with a view to providing more consistent treatment of inventions that included significant elements of computer software. Malcolm Harbour was in favour of this, but the European Parliament rejected the proposals in July 2005.

“In the end it proved to be impossible to find a legally secure form of language that would deliver or put some boundaries around patentability, given that, by definition, you do not know what will be patented as it has not yet been invented. There was a huge amount of lobbying, plus it also got mixed up with people saying it was an attack on open source software, which clearly it was not, and others saying that it was an attempt by Microsoft to control the European economy.

“This is one of those subjects that completely divides people. Some said it was designed to protect large businesses at the expense of small businesses, but small businesses are very important in the software sector as, without patents, small businesses cannot get venture capital. Finally we registered a failure to agree, and I think that was the right thing to do.”

Community Patent

“A much more fundamental question is whether the European patent system is a disadvantage to the European economy as a whole, given that innovation and discovery will be a critical competitive dimension for Europe in the future. There is a proposal for a Community Patent that has been in the pipeline for a number of years, but the Member States have consistently failed to agree on it. There are two main reasons for this: one is that language has always been an intractable problem, and the other is that the Community Patent never addressed what the role of the national patent offices would be, and there was some resistance to the idea that the national patent offices would be in some way marginalised by this process.

“It is only my personal view, but my instinct now is that there is not a great resurgence and drive behind the Community Patent; it has almost become too hard, especially now there are 25 Member States – shortly to be 27. I do not see the Commission, Member Governments or even industry giving it a high priority; the cost advantages of the Community Patent do not appear to be such as to make it very attractive to industry. However, there is work going, a consultation process, to see what improvements could be made to the  system, so there should be a paper produced soon.”

While Malcolm Harbour has not been directly involved with the Community Patent, he has been spending time recently on the Machinery Directive and, more specifically, recent amendments to it.

“This was intended to be a simplified version of the Machinery Directive, which is immensely complex because it covers so many sectors. However, people knew how to work with it, so we did not fundamentally seek to challenge the concept or structure of it. But we did suggest a lot of changes and it has now had its second reading and is being implemented. In practical terms it is not going to make a huge amount of difference to people in the machinery sector.

“But what is more important is to look at some sectors that are not particularly well covered; we need to do something about getting a much better regulatory climate. One area that I am interested in is construction machinery, which is the subject of far too much national legislation in areas such as roadgoing requirements. In relative terms, the construction machinery sector has a far higher regulatory burden than, say, cars, because construction machines are subject to regulations relating to roadgoing vehicles and machinery.

“I have been speaking with the construction machinery manufacturers, and particularly with JCB, which is one of my constituency companies, about the possibility of trying to get some of the manufacturers, customers, users and legislators together. Much of this is driven by health and safety issues, so you need to talk to both manufacturers and construction trade unions.

An integrated approach

“This would follow on from the approach of the CARS 21 (a Competitive Automotive Regulatory System for the 21st century project). What is needed is a much more integrated approach so that an industry can plan and accommodate legislative changes within its normal product lifecycle. If you try and introduce technological developments under extreme legislative pressure, you end up with more expensive solutions; consumers will get better value from a better planned solution. You can also manage tradeoffs better; for example, safety requirements have produced vastly safer cars but also heavier and, in some cases, less aerodynamic cars. On the one hand we have improved safety but, on the other hand, we have reduced energy efficiency.

“The other crucial element in all of this is that European Legislation is a partnership between the Commission, Parliament and Member States; one of the problems for cars, in particular, is that a significant body of legislation that fundamentally affects product demand and product lifecycles is controlled by the Member States. For example, Member States decide how a car is taxed and how fuels are taxed relative to each other. If they have different policies, it gives the car manufacturers difficulties because they have entirely different demands and product mixes from one Member State to another. Member States can also adversely upset a structured introduction to legislation by, for example, unilaterally offering an early tax incentive to encourage the adoption of diesel particulate traps. For a company trying to run an efficient manufacturing and distribution operation, it is a major headache.

“The idea of CARS 21 was to get the Member States, at Ministerial level, to sit down with the car manufacturers, trade unions and component manufactures to work through these issues. I think the Final Report is an extremely valuable one because it is the first time that this strategic approach has been set down; it has chapters about better regulation and how the Commission should approach regulation. But the crucial thing now is delivering the recommendations; the Commission’s staff have to look at them and the Member States have to look at them. There is a major political task now to deliver this work and show that this process has some credibility.

“This relates back to what I said earlier about construction equipment: we should be taking a similar approach, getting the stakeholders together to try and unlock some of these problems. But part of the problem is that there is a school of thought that says everything has to be done by legislation; there are advocacy groups and consumer groups that think if you put in place voluntary legislation and codes of practice that industry are essentially committed to conforming to, it is somehow weaker than having heavyweight legislation. I am not convinced about that at all; I think this is a psychological barrier we can overcome, because if we put in proper standards, then people will work with them.”

Global competition

Looking beyond particular sectors and their regulation, Malcolm Harbour believes Europe is generally in a strong position to meet the challenges posed by emerging economies, though we must not be complacent.

“As we compete more with countries such as China, where labour costs are so much lower, Europe needs to maintain the advantage in terms of technology. We need to stimulate more research, development and innovation, engage more creating and interesting designers, find ways of taking new concepts and new knowledge in science, bioscience and biotechnologies and convert that into new product opportunities. It is also important to help companies improve their production processes, take cost out of manufacturing, have more flexible production systems and improve quality.

“The other crucial element is improving the supply chain; a lot of the biggest changes today are taking place below the headline level of the big companies, further and further down the supply chain. Supply chains today are being reconstructed and more responsibilities are being pushed down the supply chain. In the car industry, for example, there are now ‘interior module’ suppliers that are involved from the start of the design process, going on to organising the tooling and then supplying the complete fascia to the production line, with units customised to each car. The supplier is therefore an integral part of the production system. And it is the same for suspension systems, front ends and many other major sub-assemblies.

“Today’s supply chain extends outside Europe so that European manufacturers are benefiting from the same low labour rates that are often perceived to be a threat. And competitive balances keep shifting, as the less sophisticated economies develop new competencies, increase their earning power and stimulate demand for high-value products that are supplied by the more sophisticated economies.

“We need to be thinking in terms of a virtuous circle of globalisation. The movement of manufacturing to low-cost-base economies is predictable and manageable without destroying our society. We just have to be prepared to adapt to it. Where politicians have failed is in explaining to people that actually this is good for them in the longer term, as they are essentially going to end up with higher skills and higher-value-added jobs.”