Silchester Control Systems – Pandemic Newsletter

As a society, we are all learning lessons from this terrible pandemic. However, as a business, Silchester Controls feels it has handled the situation well and has responded in a flexible, positive manner to the challenges.

David Jones and his engineering team reacted very rapidly, early in the pandemic, to offset its impacts on both the safety of personnel and on the efficiencies of our working practices. We have been open throughout the lockdowns, with no government support, to service our clients’ needs. We reset Silchester’s organisation, its operations and administration with a new set of safe working practices which also, rather unexpectedly, introduced greater and very welcome efficiencies. These streamlined communications and record-keeping, travel and away-from-home working arrangements. These changes, we believe, allowed us to continue to respond smoothly to our customers’ needs from our offices and out in the field. At least, that’s what we’ve been told!

And our customers, nationally and internationally, have kept operating at quite high levels and continued to request our support, which has kept us very busy. In the UK, in the last quarter of 2020, “production industries remained 4.4% below their February 2020 level, growing by 1.3% in the latest month and manufacturing has declined by 6.6% since February 2020, growing by 1.7% during October 2020”. (Source: Office for National Statistics – Monthly GDP). These falls in production and manufacturing have been less than was feared and the pickup in summer and autumn 2020 happened faster than many expected, giving us grounds for post-pandemic optimism for the industrial economy..