ALFED History

In 1962, the UK aluminium industry was just over a century old. The first aluminium having been produced using the Deville process by C H Gerhardt in Battersea, London, and Bells Brothers in Washington, Newcastle upon Tyne, in 1859. Britain’s modern aluminium industry dated from the opening of the British Aluminium Company’s first reduction works and hydro-electric scheme at Foyers on the banks of Loch Ness in 1895. Domestic and global demand for aluminium expanded dramatically during the First World War, with its various military uses, and then increasingly in civilian spin-offs from kitchen pans to transport. That expansion of the metal in the interwar years of 1919-39 was in no small part a result of international industry cooperation and government sponsorship.

By the early 1960s, the UK aluminium industry was presented with considerable opportunities. It was also confronted by a number of challenges. On the one hand, the UK was experiencing significant growth with rising affluence and national infrastructure investment, notably in transport (accounting for almost one third of the domestic aluminium market), with the growth of national airlines and passenger and transport planes, new rolling stock for the railways, the advent of shipping containerization (in 1956) and household car ownership (which almost quadrupled between 1950 and 1960).

The Federation was also increasingly encumbered by the reach of its membership and the composition of its governance structures, notably the ALFED Council and specifically the power exercised by the vertically integrated global majors (BACo, Alcan and Alcoa). By 1972, matters had come to a head, with a growing number of industry leaders increasingly disgruntled at the governance and direction of ALFED publicly demanding reform. As the Financial Times in May 1972 reported: ‘The Federation has been shrinking in scope and budget for several years’, causing the closure of ALFED’s London office to save money.

The pivotal decades of the 1970s and 1980s profoundly altered the global and domestic aluminium industry and highlighted the need for ALFED’s need to increase its visibility and voice in Parliament and with government, and strengthen its capabilities in public affairs, as well enhancing its technical training to support knowledge exchange and innovation in the industry. This was particularly noticeable around the issues of emissions, energy prices and recycling. Factors that were made all the more pressing by the greater attention to tackling pollution, climate change and the impact that the floating of aluminium on the LME had on prices.

The plummeting of global aluminium prices was compounded with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 which led to the flooding of markets with cheap ingot leading to a significant scaling back of UK primary production. All of this highlighted the profoundly different positions occupied by sections of the ALFED membership, most pointedly between the large primary producers and stockists.

By the 21st century, the domestic and global aluminium industries had profoundly changed. Many of the global majors disappeared during the first decade of the new century, with Alcan being absorbed by global conglomerate miner Rio Tinto in 2007. Of the first movers in the industry, only Alcoa remained standing. This had a profound impact on ALFED’s membership, structures and outlook, as David Harris’ successor Will Savage (CEO, 2005 – 2017) acknowledged in an interview with Light Metal Age in 2015. As successive presidents and Savage captured, this was a period of soul searching for ALFED as it sought to reorientate itself and enhance its capabilities to reflect the changing circumstances and context.