Boss of manufacturer William Group takes swipes at politicians despite rising revenues

The steel castings group enjoyed a strong 2025, accounts show

The owner of historic UK steel company William Cook has taken a number of swipes at politicians as his company announced rising turnover and profits.

Sir Andrew Cook, chairman of the County Durham and Yorkshire-based steel castings business used the group’s latest accounts to accuse law makers of “fiddling and flirting with costly and unreliable wind and solar while energy demand increases and black-outs loom”. The remarks came as the group – which supplies the defence, rail, manufacturing and structural engineering sectors – reported turnover of almost £100m and a rise in operating profits from £22.3m to £24.2m in the year to the end of June 2025.

It is not the first time industrialist Sir Andrew has aimed criticism at Westminster, having previously said Government efforts to promote a resurgence of UK manufacturing were “wishful thinking”. His group, which employs more than 600 across sites in the North East, Yorkshire and Cumbria, includes various subsidiaries including Cook Defence Systems Ltd, William Cook Rail and a newly created US-based company, among others.

The buoyant 2025 results were credited to the performance of the group’s defence business, which includes production of tank tracks. Sir Andrew said the “internationally unstable situation” was forcing increased spending by NATO members and allies. In addition to the firm’s work for the British Army, Cook Defence Systems also exported to more than a dozen allied nations during the year, serving more than 6,000 vehicles.

The group’s rail business was also said to have prospered, with separate accounts showing turnover falling from £14.5m to £13.8m but its gross profit margin increasing to more than 23% and operating profits up from about £71,000 to more than £556,000. It has contracts for different rolling stock operating across the country, including underground trains.

Sir Andrew said: “It is a testament to our persistence and determination – my motto – that rail has remained a key component of our business despite the sector’s neglect by successive British governments: a neglect which has led to there being no remaining domestic train-builder at all. Instead, taxpayers’ money is squandered on the absurd and truncated HS2 while the rest of the system, best described as ‘good second world’, labours on.”

The chairman added: “Our industrial business had a difficult year, with low order levels continuing. However, this was expected, which is why considerable investment has continued with the goal of making it fit for the future, manned, equipped and qualified to manufacture the ultra-high specification cast components which inevitably will be required when the nuclear industry finally gets its act together.

“In this respect the vacillation of politicians is beyond disgraceful, fiddling and flirting with costly and unreliable wind and solar while energy demand increases and black-outs loom.

“Appropriately, I reproduce an extract from my letter, first published in the Financial Times in 2003: ‘When in the flickering fight of wind and solar-generated power, the realisation finally dawns that nuclear energy is the only reliable way of supplying this planet with carbon-free electricity, the factories which could make nuclear power stations will be long gone and the engineers who knew how to make them, dead’. To which I have nothing to add, other than to reassure readers that William Cook is still alive and kicking and, thank God and medical science, so am I.”