Industrial Strategy

Baroness Coussins Excerpts

Monday 8th January 2018 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Coussins (CB)]

My Lords, a major petrochemical company recently backed away from investing £4 million a year in jobs in Scotland because it was worried that it would not be able to recruit staff with the necessary foreign language skills. And that is just the tip of the iceberg. Research suggests that the UK economy is losing out on well over £50 billion a year in contracts because of a lack of language skills in the workforce. If you cannot read the initial tender documents, you cannot bid for the contract, and they are by no means always written in English. A British Council report published in November said that the top five languages needed by the UK for prosperity and influence post Brexit are Spanish, Mandarin, French, Arabic and German.

Before I go on, I should declare my interests as co-chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Modern Languages and as vice-president of the Chartered Institute of Linguists.

It is a regrettable flaw in a strategy which has such exciting and ambitious objectives that no mention is made of language skills as one of the key ingredients for enabling the UK to innovate, trade, prosper and lead in a global economy. Important and vital though English is, it is a mistake to believe that English is enough. The standard excuse for Britain’s neglect of foreign languages is that English is the world’s lingua franca. What this really means is that English is the world’s preferred second language, not its first. In fact, only 6% of the world’s population are native English speakers, and in the 21st century speaking only English is as much of a disadvantage as speaking no English.

It is also a mistake to depend on artificial intelligence for language translation, and it is worrying that the only direct mention of language skills to be found in the White Paper is in the context of AI and technology. Of course AI can be useful here but it is no substitute for the interpersonal skills, sensitive translations and localisation of sales, marketing and communications provided by people, not algorithms.

We have robust evidence to illustrate the importance of languages for business and growth. One study of SME exporters showed that companies that invest in language skills are able to increase the ratio of exports to sales by 37%. By contrast, evidence also shows that UK businesses are largely in an Anglophone bubble, with 83% of SMEs operating only in English, even though half of them say that language skills would help expand business and build export growth. The British Chambers of Commerce says that the biggest language deficits are in the fastest-growing markets and that over three-quarters of the companies it surveyed had missed or lost business because of this.

The White Paper flags up a review of export strategy to report in spring this year. I ask the Minister to ensure that language skills form part of this review and that the Government’s GREAT website will give fuller advice on language skills and export growth. Could the Minister say also whether the network of nine UK trade commissioners to be established will have language skills as part of their remit? Relevant expertise is available, but it needs to be integrated and not just remembered as an afterthought. Under the former UKTI, one-to-one advice on language and cultural issues was provided—in 2015-16 to over 1,000 companies in one region alone. This service has now ceased in favour of regional contracts with the Department for International Trade, and it is not at all clear whether local businesses will still be able to access guidance on overcoming language and cultural barriers to trade.

The White Paper recognises regional disparities in the UK’s skills base. There are stark regional weaknesses in participation and attainment in foreign languages, which correlate with regions of poor productivity and low skill levels. For example, in the north-east in 2016, only 43% of pupils sat a GCSE in a language, compared to 65% in inner London, and this gap has been widening year on year. We also need Her Majesty’s Government to build languages into their plans for technical education. The national retraining scheme for targeting skills shortages is welcome, but can the Minister say whether modern foreign languages will be considered as a skill shortage in the next phase of the scheme? Over 70% of UK employers say that they are not happy with the foreign language skills of our school leavers or graduates, and are forced increasingly to recruit from overseas to meet their needs. Looking ahead to a post-Brexit world in which the UK aspires to be a leader in global free trade, it is rather shameful that only 9% of British 15 year-olds are competent in a first foreign language beyond a very basic level; that compares to 42% of teenagers across 14 other European countries.

The language industry is a sector not mentioned in the strategy, but in my view it would be an ideal candidate for the kind of sector deal envisaged in the Government’s thinking. The language industry encompasses interpreters, translators, teachers, researchers, people who write textbooks, apps, CDs and websites, people who do subtitling and dubbing for films and TV, and all manner of other experts. This sector is estimated to be worth over €20 billion across the EU and has a very high growth rate. As an English-speaking nation, we are surely uniquely well-placed to take strategic advantage of this expected further growth, not only in Europe but worldwide. I am aware of a proposal for a sector deal for the tourism industry, which acknowledges that language skills are vital for increasing the value of inbound tourism and hospitality. Specifically, it says that,

“language skills are an essential business requirement and a significant element of providing good customer service”.

We are not going to satisfy the needs of business or consumers if we do not act urgently to reverse the crisis in language education in the UK. Thanks to the EBacc, the number of GCSE entries is now stable, but A-level is in free fall. Since 2000, over 50 universities have scrapped some or all of their modern language degree courses. Uncertainty over the future of the Erasmus programme has seen applications dip even further, and so we are not producing enough languages graduates to meet even the teacher shortage, never mind the needs of the wider economy.

Report after report from significant bodies such as the British Council and the British Academy, as well as the all-party group, has called repeatedly for a cross-government national languages strategy, because this is not a crisis solely for the Department for Education. Will the Minister undertake to initiate discussions across all relevant departments, at ministerial level, to start shaping such a strategy? Without the glue of language skills, the different elements of the industrial strategy will not hang together.

I have been talking mainly about export growth, but prospective inward investors do not want a monolingual environment either. Over one-quarter of senior executives from top European companies rated access to multiple language skills as “absolutely essential” when considering where to locate their business. This has been a significant driver in London’s economic success.

I hope that the information I have provided this evening might trigger some revisions of this industrial strategy. Language skills are a key enabler of success. The language sector itself is an exemplar of innovation and leadership. By integrating these, the vision and objectives of the industrial strategy will be much more achievable.