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MsKelly Pok, Head
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Folly
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COMED
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Foreign and Commonwealth Office
London SW1A 2AH
3 June 1988
Dear Res.
The Secretary of State has asked me to pursue with you a point which was made forcibly to him (and indeed separately to Lady Howe and me) during his visit to the Hong Kong Polytechnic earlier this week.
During his visit to the Industrial Centre at the Polytechnic the Principal, whose name I fear I cannot recall, spoke to him about his disappointment at the unwillingness of British industry to involve themselves in imaginative schemes with institutes such as his to promote their own products, particularly in the machine tools area. He cited Germany and Sweden as two countries whose industries regularly donated machine tools on a variety of different arrangements for teaching purposes in Polytechnics in the Far East. Singapore was said to be a particularly good example of this (this to some extent echoes points that were made to the Secretary of State during his recent visit to Singapore about the extent to which German and Swedish industry was succeeding in making Singapore a service centre for their equipment in the area). It was said that British industry had either been uninterested in such schemes, or had said they could not undertake them unless HMG paid for them.
The Secretary of State was particularly struck by the precision measuring equipment which Zeiss of West Germany had donated to the Polytechnic. The arrangement apparently is that the Polytechnic have the use of the equipment for teaching purposes, and are assisted in this by Zeiss engineers. During the hours when the machinery is not in use for such purposes, Zeiss themselves use the equipment for their own purposes, no doubt for demonstration and so forth. The result is that students graduating from the Polytechnic tend to think of Zeiss first in this field, and carry that prejudice forward into their future jobs.
The Secretary of State thinks that there is an area here which deserves attention, and is thinking of taking this whole subject up with Lord Young. Before doing so, however, he would like to get a slightly more coherent picture of the views and background information which those concerned at the Industrial Centre were putting across. We have only the rather patchy details which we were able to glean while talking to them as we went round the centre.