THE decision by Switzerland’s Givaudan to divest from Merseyside seems to have the air of inevitability to it.

After all, so many UK manufacturing plants are migrating eastwards.

Givaudan, a flavourings and fragrances maker, believes richer pickings can be found in the growing eastern European market place. It is combining its Bromborough and Swiss operations into a gleaming new factory in Hungary.

The Bromborough factory, which used to trade under the name Quest International, has passed through the hands of several owners in the past 13 years. It changed hands in 1997 when Unilever decided it was time to get out of chemicals. Quest was one of several businesses that switched from Unilever to ICI for £5bn.

ICI was more optimistic about the speciality chemicals market. At the time, it was pursuing a strategy of getting out of bulk chemical production in favour of higher margin products that firms like Quest offered.

Nine years later, though, ICI got out of this market, too. It sold to the Swiss for £1.2bn.

You can’t blame the Swiss for their action. It seems that, whenever big traditional manufacturers are looking to upgrade or modernise their facilities, they choose to do so by moving overseas. Eastern Europe must be awash with shiny new factories, leaving western Europe with a growing collection of old, idle plants (Quest Bromborough factory was opened in the 1950s).

Givaudan’s decision is yet another example of the sort of forces that Britain’s inward investment agencies are up against.

We don’t seem able to compete for a growing range of manufacturing activities, and not just low technology stuff either.

It raises the question, what will Britain’s manufacturing base look like in 10 years’ time?

TALKING about the inevitable, the decision to make Professional Liverpool chief executive Mark Chadwick redundant was always going to happen after the Northwest Development Agency decided to withdraw funding.

The NWDA stumped up about 80% of Professional Liverpool’s annual funding bill of £200,000, suggesting that the professional firms that it represents were not digging too deep into their own pockets.

Sadly, when it comes to professional services, Liverpool is not a very active market place. That’s not to say you can’t find good accountants or lawyers here, because you can. It’s more that there aren’t enough of them to allow the city to develop a reputation as a centre for professional advice.

This may be having serious economic consequences. For example, fewer of our local enterprises gain access to capital investment available through the stock market.

The idea of location- specific professional communities may be a bit passé in the regions. If you look at the way the big professional practices are organised, you would conclude geography plays a limited part.

Accountants and law firms are more likely to be organised by national and international specialisms. A VAT expert in Liverpool could very well report to a boss seated in Edinburgh, London or Brussels. A property lawyer in London may report to a partner in Liverpool. A firm’s profile in any city is increasingly determined by the personal preferences of an individual, rather than the existence of huge market place.

Professional Liverpool may yet continue in some form, with an unpaid organising committee staging promotional events, but I can’t help thinking that the demise of Professional Liverpool reflects the relative weakness of the local market place.