From building ventilators to making masks, small firms doing their bit in coronavirus fight

Matt Deighton’s furniture company was, for all intents and purposes, stopped in its tracks once the COVID-19 lockdown started.

“You feel down for a few days and a bit helpless, because our passion has been taken away from us,” he says. “Then you reflect and look at a factory that’s empty and a sewing room that’s empty and your brain starts ticking over. Could there be something we could do that might make a positive contribution?”

Bolton-based Sofas by Saxon is just one of the thousands of small and medium-sized businesses that have been repurposed to provide the NHS with vital PPE and ventilators in the fight against coronavirus. “I’ve got to be honest, it’s brought a breath of life back into the company,” says Deighton. “Just feeling like you’re able to contribute has been a big motivating factor.”

It all started with with Deighton contacting his local ScrubHub, a network of voluntary groups sewing workwear for NHS staff.

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Sofas by Saxon procures the required fabric, which it cuts to size on machines that had only a month ago been making Chesterfields and chaise longues. This is then forwarded to groups of volounteers who sew them into gowns and masks for the NHS frontline workers at local hospitals.

“Everything that’s being done is being donated to the NHS so there’s no financial aspect to it,” says Deighton. “Some of these volunteers are buying their own fabric out of their own money. It’s just incredible, the lengths people are going to. For us to be able to play a small part in that is the very least we can do really.”

At aerospace engineering firm Produmax in Shipley, they are retooling to manufacture ventilator parts simply because, as co-owner Mandy Ridyard says, “it is the right thing to do”. Again, there is no money to be made. “We are manufacturing at cost,” she points out. “We do not want to profit out from being part of a national effort.”

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That is despite the demand turning Produmax into a 24-hour, seven-day operation. “Normally we would turn a quote around in about a week and we’d probably start production about three or four weeks later,” says Ridyard. “We turned a [new] quote around in two hours and started production that night. That’s the difference in speed.

“It’s very busy. Obviously working at speed with new customers is always tricky. We need to understand every element of the specification – how things are packed, where they want the parts sent to, and there’s a lot of people trying to make things happen very quickly. But overall, it’s business as usual.”

The demand is even greater on those manufacturing companies who already made the much-needed medical equipment. CNF Engineering has ramped up production and shipping of ventilator parts to 29,000 a week. “We’re working 24/7, our factory doesn’t shut, we’ve been here at weekends and all Easter weekend. We’ve not stopped,” says the managing director, Neil Fearnley.

Despite decades of steady movement towards a service-based British economy, Fearnley believes the manufacturing sector is performing well.

“It is exactly what happened in the Second World War and they were making bits for Spitfires, it’s no different to that,” he says. “We’ve proven how efficient we can be in the UK doing this. It’s not just people like us making the stuff, it’s the material manufacturers and suppliers, the plating suppliers, all the people that really don’t get any fanfare.”

Fearnley warns of a saturated market in his industry once the fight against the coronavirus is eventually over. “There’s a lot of work in the country because of this at the moment but that work is going to drop off a cliff very quickly when it finishes,” he adds.

“100 per cent there’s an oversupply, because you’re making 30, 40 or 50 times more machines than would normally have been made.”

Since a variety of disparate businesses are working in different parts of the supply chain opinions on this makeshift system’s efficiency will vary.

Fearnley, who is working with a range of ventilator consortiums, believes much of the criticism that the government has faced has been unfair.

“Realistically nobody plans for this kind of stuff because nobody expects it to happen,” he argues. Ridyard meanwhile is mindful that these are “unprecedented” times. “Maybe more could have been done earlier but in a war situation like this it requires people to step up to help, and that’s what we’ve done,” she says.

Others are more critical. At Aurora 3D Printing, a firm helping produce PPE visors, Tom O’Reilly was happy to step up to the plate.

“There’s that saying if nobody else is going to do it you might as well do it yourself,” he says. “So far, from what I’ve seen, it’s everyone doing something and the people who are supposed to be doing something – even though they’re facing a monumental task – they’re not delivering. I’m definitely not laying any blame at their door but the people I’ve spoken to are not happy, to say the least.”

At Brandon Medical, a Leeds-based company that has helped source and distribute ventilators to NHS Trusts as well as manufacture parts, there is frustration with the government’s “chaotic” attempts at coordinating procurement.

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“You basically get a sequence of calls from people who ask you stuff, ask you to fill out a form and then disappear. From the outside, it looks disjointed,” says executive chairman Graeme Hall. “There are lots of clever people but they’re in a field that they are naive and ignorant about – ignorant in a literal sense of the word, rather than a nasty sense – and they’re going round in circles.”

And though Deighton has nothing but admiration for the sewing groups he is working with at a community level, he wonders whether such an approach should be necessary.

“As a taxpayer, you just expect the NHS to have the equipment that they need. To find out how drastic the shortage was and how desperate it was for the nurses, they’re literally picking [PPE] up before they go into work,” he says. “We should never be in this situation but at the same time we have to accept who we are, make the most of it and hopefully lessons will be learned from this and it won’t be allowed to occur again.”

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