Bank of England Governor Mark Carney has praised the University of Sheffield Advanced Manufacturing Research Centre for its contribution to UK manufacturing's recovery.

Mr Carney was delivering his last public speech before the General Election at the Nuclear AMRC, an event that coincided with the publication of "Building Futures" - a new book celebrating the achievements of the whole of the AMRC.

Building Futures marks the 10^th anniversary of the completion of the first AMRC building on the Advanced Manufacturing Park at Waverley and includes a foreword by the Governor in which he hails the AMRC as "a world leader in metallurgy and engineering research".

Mr Carney expanded on that theme during his speech, telling a 200 strong audience of local business people: "Sheffield has remained fleet of foot through innovation. The University of Sheffield Advanced Manufacturing Research Centre is the latest and prime example of that.

"No one knows better than the people in this room that manufacturing needs to be ever more productive to prosper in a world of strongly falling prices and rising international competition.

"The strong recovery of UK manufacturing in the last year, growth stronger than at any point in the past decade, is testament to the sector's continuing improvement."

Mr Carney said manufacturing was punching well above its weight in terms of investment in research and development and that was crucial to the UK's prosperity because the country's long term performance depended on productivity growth.

Sheffield had shown that, in a rapidly changing global economy, hard work, clearness of vision and fleetness of foot were giving manufacturing the opportunity to determine its own future and the AMRC was an example of that.

Responding to questions from the audience, Mr Carney emphasised the importance of the UK's borders remaining open to recruits from abroad.

Gifted foreign students who came to the University of Sheffield and the AMRC, and stayed on to work in Sheffield, were helping to create the advanced manufacturing techniques that led to future jobs, said the Bank of England Governor.

University Vice Chancellor, Professor Sir Keith Burnett, told Mr Carney and guests that the AMRC now had ambitions to help companies from the region develop Britain's infrastructure.

Sir Keith said: "We know that in this region we have a fabulously powerful but untapped capability to build the infrastructure. We are going to be putting together the capability to build the infrastructure."

Former Trade Minister and AMRC strategic adviser Richard Caborn also highlighted the AMRC's achievements, including the creation of the AMRC Training Centre, which Mr Carney went on to visit later in the day.

Mr Caborn said the Training Centre not only gave young people the skills to be first class artisans, it also opened the way for young people from some of Sheffield's most deprived areas to go on to gain top level engineering degrees.

Click here to download the full speech by Mark Carney, Governor, Bank of England.

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