Redundancy Deadline: MP and Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer, Anneliese Dodds, visits Weightron Bilanciai Ltd.

With three days remaining for SMEs to provide redundancy notices due to the furlough scheme ending on the 31st October – MP and Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer,

Anneliese Dodds, discusses with Europe’s leading supplier of weighbridge systems, automation and software, Weightron Bilanciai, that notices must be given to employees that are not able to come back to a job.

This week’s looming deadline is likely to affect between 20-99 people within each SME across the country, and with sixteen different types of engineering sectors – this could greatly amplify the number of job losses across the UK.

Thanks to strategic business management, the future at Weightron is bright, which means Weightron is pleased to announce that this deadline won’t be affecting them.

In response to Anneliese’s advice and visit to Weightron’s premises in Chesterfield, Nick Catt, managing director from Weightron said: ‘We’re extremely grateful for the coronavirus retention scheme but thanks to the diversity of our customer base, with the necessity of engineering and high-level automation software solutions, the industry sectors we operate in are back up and running. We’re in a financially stable position and the future of Weightron is bright, which means we’re confident that we can retain all of our skilled staff and dedicated engineers with further plans to expand our team in the next 12 months.’

With Ms Dodds’ political views in favour of investment in tech to help prevent climate change, it’s clear that maintaining and supporting current and future engineering jobs is vital if we’re to live in a greener future. This is why Ms Dodds wishes for all companies, especially those similar to Weightron, to have the ability to recruit experienced and talented engineers in the future, so that we can form new environmentally-friendly practices and meet the demand as sustainable technology develops and grows. 

In line with this, Ms Dodds said: “That’s why we need a targeted and flexible job recovery scheme that incentivises businesses in key sectors to bring back staff on reduced hours as well as rewarding employers who offer staff high-quality training.”

Ms Dodds is also pursuing enforcement of a National Retraining Strategy to aid those who are on reduced hours or have lost their jobs. Ms Dodds said: “Labour’s National Retraining Strategy would also help people whose hours had been cut to increase their skills or to retrain in a new area so people who have lost their jobs can transition into new work.”

Ms Dodds concluded with: “It was great to visit Weightron to see how manufacturers are coping with this crisis. Weightron is weathering the storm, but all too many SMEs are finding it understandably difficult.”

Weightron builds and supplies efficient weighing solutions to a number of different industries (including agriculture, construction, logistics, quarrying and mining, biomass & EFW, facilities management, manufacturing, waste, and recycling, chemical and petrochemical, food and beverage and medical).

Their innovative weighbridge solutions designed to maximise loads and reduce vehicle traffic, combined with itemised waste management and tracking solutions, ensure environmentally friendly, cost-effective products to help businesses to run like clockwork and make businesses much more profitable and sustainable.