I WONDER if you can name the only UK based manufacturer of lifejackets?  Bonus points for naming the brand.

I never thought a new sponsorship relationship with Ocean Safety who have generously supplied all of the MCA coded safety equipment for my new wheelchair accessible powerboat would lead to me wheeling around a factory floor in Leven, Scotland, on a bitterly cold winter’s day.  

REMPLOY, manufacturers of the KRU brand of lifejacket exclusively for Ocean Safety, are no ordinary business, they employ only disabled people.  In fact they employ nearly 3,000 disabled people across their 54 factories in the UK.  

But it is their two factories in Fyfe, who make the KRU jackets, in particular, the Leven site which makes more than 100,000 lifejackets a year and has nearly 30 employees, some of whom have worked there for up to forty years.

Reasons for my visit were threefold: to have an opportunity as a disabled yachtsman who actually wears and depends upon their product to see the jackets being made from scratch; to talk through some practical issues which could enhance their existing range for disabled life-jacket wearers and wheelchair users; and to coincide and celebrate the UN backed annual International Day of the Disabled last month.

There was a fourth, unwritten reason too, for me at least. And that was to draw attention to the fact that the livelihoods of these 3,000 employees in the UK, including the skilled workers who make KRU jackets, is under threat.

The government no longer wants to underwrite the cost of these jobs and a report in front of ministers right now is recommending these disabled employees should not be protected and the REMPLOY manufactories should be brought into the private sector.

It’s an ethical dilemma but the politicians will almost certainly look at the bottom line figures in an effort to make short term savings.  Any such action would almost certainly see the end of the only UK based lifejacket manufactory (plus all of the other REMPLOY product manufactories) and the ruination of these 3,000 tax-payers’ livelihoods, many of whom will almost certainly end up on benefits which will cost the state much more long term.

And what price can you put on dignity and self-esteem as an employee?  These guys are not a charity case. They aren’t sewing mail bags or weaving baskets, I was bowled over by the skill levels on the production line.  After all, they are making the one product we as recreational water users all depend upon in an emergency at sea.

And should that moment ever arise, our life is genuinely in their hands.