I joined the shipbuilding industry indirectly in 1971 when I was recruited by a firm of London-based shipping consultants, Maritime Transport Research, which had been set up in 1966 as British Shipbuilding Exports and served the SRNA by producing marketing reports. By 1971, I think the management at Maritime Transport Research had found that it was an impossible task to undertake marketing for shipyards where they had no executive authority, and they changed direction into carrying out research studies on bulk cargoes and future markets for the type of ships built in the UK. I remained on the payroll of the SRNA and we were located in their offices in London until nationalisation in 1977, when the SRNA was wound up. On vesting day, I joined British Shipbuilders as Group Economist. In September 1980 I was made Director of Business Development, responsible for corporate planning, and held that position until April 1988 when I moved to Chase Manhattan Bank.

One of the surprising things about the shipbuilding industry was that it had a great deal of knowledge of its problems. Most of the young men who had compiled the Patton Report on Productivity became senior figures in the industry before nationalisation. The conclusion I came to at the end of spending ten years throwing money at the problem of why British Shipbuilders productivity was not very good was as follows. The best place to start is probably with understanding just how bad it was. In terms of comparing productivity you will be told by all the experts that you can not do it precisely, and that is true. But, it is a fact that the Japanese shipyards that were, say, producing Panamax bulk carriers, were taking about 300,000 man hours at a time when British shipyards at nationalisation were taking about 950,000 man hours. In fact by the end of the 1980s they were taking over 1.3m man hours, so productivity actually fell during the ten year period; despite the fact that there had been quite an increase in sub-contracting. Shipbuilding is the world's most difficult industry. I have worked in four industries now and none are as difficult as shipbuilding. It is a very complex industry. It has got a very long gestation period for the product, and it takes years and years to do anything about it.