By John Caine

This must be important if it gets the Prime Minister, his Deputy and the Leader of the Opposition at the same photo opportunity at McLaren’s fabulous facilities with their Formula 1 stars also in tow.

The £1m prize will be awarded for “a ground breaking advance in engineering which has created significant benefits to humanity”.

This £1m prize will hopefully grab the attention of the media and the public and help raise the profile of Engineering within our society and help inform its importance to the economy.

The politicians all talk about rebalancing our economy away from consumer debt and financial services towards manufacturing and engineering services.

This is a starting point and an initiative from industry which the government must build upon if it is serious about truly rebalancing the UK’s economy.

Raising the profile of Engineering has been talked about by engineers and their professional institutions for decades with little real progress. I believe that television programmes such as that currently showing on the BBC “How to Build” which features world class British Engineering such as the Airbus Wing Manufacture and the McLaren car manufacturing will enthuse and encourage youngsters to consider a career in engineering just as the brilliant BBC series on Outer Space (Not sure of the programme title) has lead to an increase in the number of students wanting to study physics at University.

It will take a generation to lift the profile of engineering but this prize is another good building block.

If we had a TV soap based around a top notch engineering company then maybe that would push the profile of engineering further into the publics mind?