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Written by Ron Noon at 12:49 on Friday, February 20th 2009
A moot point at the very least to former Tate & Lyle management is my claim that It was Regional aid and ship sales that financed Redundant Refinery lives. I first made these points in a piece written just before Christmas 08 but perhaps “my controversial conclusion” could be challenged on Sunday so it is worth flagging up again. There was more to the closure of Love Lane than the egregious Common Agricultural Policy which prioritised beet at the expense of cane supplies Tates received from African, Carribean and Pacific countries.
Although an important part of the project’s unfinished business relates to filmed interviews of people’s perceptions as to why they think Love Lane was closed, and we have interviewed many who think it “was a great firm to work for”, there are however two incontrovertible facts which have shaped my conclusions. Some former employees might take exception to what I am now going to write but in 1981 when the decision to close the refinery was taken, there was not a Tate nor a Lyle on the board. Sentiment and nostalgia were not the basis of decision making down in Sugar Quay. Tate & Lyle was a Sugar Giant that had decided that Henry Tate’s mother plant was now expendible. I have been told by a number of people I have interviewed that local management was often as much in the dark about what was going on in this formerly “smashin’ firm to work for” as the workers like Albert and John on the “Action Committee”.
The first piece of evidence is that Tate & Lyle were the major recipients of regional aid between 1975 and 1981. That attention grabbing detail is verified by a document from the Planning Officer of the City Council, issued a few days after the 90 day redundancy notices had been issued and in the records that Albert and John gave to the Museum.
“Tate and Lyle have been aware of the problems of their refining operations for some time, and have successfully diversified into warehousing, commodity trading, distribution, shipping and speciality chemicals, inter alia. They were the largest recipient of regional aid in Liverpool over the period 1975/76 to 1979/80, receiving £3.95 million in Regional Development Grant and Regional Selective Financial Assistance.”
The second and equally incontrovertible evidence is that a couple of months after the closure of Love Lane the Lex Column in the Financial Times explained how “ship sales will cover the Liverpool redundancy costs”! Down to 1976 when trading was reorganised and “Albion Ltd” was dissolved, “profits made by the Bermuda subsidiary” of Tates Canadian subsidiary Redpath, “were reinvested to buy ships rented to a British subsidiary”! For a company that denied transfer pricing, (the technical term used to describe internal company pricing policies designed to minimise tax liabilities), that is evidence of a pretty sophisticated financial policy and one that enabled ships that were originally bought through Bermuda based subsidiaries to be sold to help finance a massive closure in “the Bermuda triangle of British capitalism”!