17 August 2015

BPIF Member hosts MP in site visit

Energetic MP Sir David Amess makes huge impact during visit to BPIF member EC2i in Southend.

• Praises the business and its employee engagement and training ethos
• Appreciates there are leading edge businesses in Southend and learns how the ‘print' sector is dynamic and influential
• Part of BPIF's campaign to engage with Westminster and champion the issues and needs of our sector

Ec2i is a leading catalogue production company winning many awards for its colour retouching skills and customer service levels. The company offers design, photography, pre-press, asset management and print management services to some of the best known names in the retail sector.

Mark Dane, MD and shareholder, took Sir David on a tour of its great facilities and introduced him to every member of staff.

Mark Dane followed up the meeting with a letter to Sir David

"The printing industry is still a great business to be involved in.

As you saw first hand our business is mainly producing mail order catalogues, this is a huge market employing thousands of people across a wide range of other sectors, including the postman who finally drops them though the letter box. The catalogues also provide a major part of revenue for a number of High St retailers, helping them with their profitability, hence ensuring they can maintain their staffing levels at head office and in the shops.

There has been some talk in the press about replacing "opt-out" options with "opt-in", for receiving mail order pieces, this would have a devastating effect on the industry. The companies that use direct mail as part of their marketing strategy, wouldn't mail out catalogues unless they delivered the right return. They therefore must play an important part in increasing sales and the recipients obviously see them as part of the buying journey, all good for the economy.

The same negative effect on the industry can be said for any changes in VAT, postal increases, and loosing the final part of control of the Royal Mail, without setting any regulations.

All SME's need all the help they can get to run their businesses successfully, so the following apply to all market sectors: Reducing red tape, tighter controls on Phoenix Companies, keeping the price of petrol as low as possible, and tax incentives which I'm happy to say your government seems to be on board with.

I wholeheartedly agree with your philosophy of getting more young people into work so any further incentives in this direction would be well received, but the additional paper work would't be.

As the BPIF document,  UK Printing- The Facts and Figures states, the industry directly employs 122k people (thousands more indirectly) and produced a £750 million trade balance in 2014, that must be worth fighting for."