Skills: Importance for the UK Economy and Quality of Life

Baroness Lane-Fox of Soho Excerpts

Thursday 9th May 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Lane-Fox of Soho (CB)]

My Lords, I too thank the noble Lord, Lord Aberdare, for this extremely important debate. I am beginning to think that the only place that there is no skills shortage is in this Chamber, although the real skill might well be fitting all that we have to say into the brief time that we have been allotted.

I was thinking through the things that I am lucky enough to have done over the last 20 years and wondering on which I should focus today. Should it be the work that we did when I was setting up Doteveryone, helping people in this building and the other place with the skills to understand digital technology more? Should it be the challenges that I saw as the chair of WeTransfer, a mid-scale tech company, as we tried to recruit people who can help us to design the future? Should it be the skills that we see and that my noble friend Lady Hayman talked about, as a director of Peers for the Planet, in transitioning to the green economy? But, as some noble Lords know, I am a relatively eternal optimist so will focus on two things that are actually working, on which I would like Members on all the Front Benches to respond in saying how important they are in their own strategic plans for skills.

The first is the local skills improvement plans that have already been mentioned, particularly by my noble friend Lord Aberdare. As president of the British Chambers of Commerce, I am thrilled that we run 32 of the 38 LSIPs that have been created around the country. These are collaborative plans that are very local and encourage businesses, local education providers of all colours and any other interested parties to sit down and map out what they need for their area to succeed. We have so far engaged over 65,000 businesses in these plans, and I will just talk to your Lordships about two specific examples.

The first is in Coventry and Warwickshire, where the chambers have been working with over 3,500 different employers. Over 74% of the employers that the chambers are working with say they have never sat down with any of the higher education providers in their area in the last five years. This unlock has been fundamental in helping both businesses and the providers plan for what both sides need over the next two or three years.

It is staggeringly interestingly to me, particularly as former chair of the committee on Covid and its long-term implications, that there seems to have been an extreme drop-off, post-Covid, in how much collaboration happens across different bits of the economy and the sectors serving the skills parts of the economy that we are talking about today. However, these local skills improvement plans are a tangible way to encourage this collaboration. When the providers have mapped out their needs, they will then come up with a plan, on both the business side and the education side—higher, tertiary or any level—for what is needed to plug those gaps. It could be advanced manufacturing or very simple skills in hospitality. There is a whole range of things.

The second example that has come out of these local skills improvement plans is the partnership that the British Chambers of Commerce has with Aviva, where we have committed to train 150 town planners. This is just a small start but gets to the core of so much of what we are talking about. Both the Government and the opposition parties have launched major reforms into planning. It is interesting that they are doing this with very little understanding of how we are going to execute that, as we have no town planners. This very small start should be an indication of how we can encourage businesses to match with a national network—Aviva with the chambers, in this case—to have the fundamental skills we need to create this change.

Please support the LSIPs. The funding runs out in 2025 but they need to be there until 2028 and beyond. We need a long-term focus on something that is actually working and that employers tell us is working.

I cannot stand here without mentioning the Open University, of which I am chancellor. The noble Baroness, Lady Garden of Frognal, has already mentioned its importance and I know noble Lords have had briefings from the university in research for today’s debate. We have this incredible national asset sitting in front of us, yet we have had battles for the last decade to get the requisite funding for this organisation. It is the organisation that is helping people to continue to retrain and get the skills they need. Some 63% of our learners are in work. They are not part-time learners; they are double-time learners. Please, let us support this fantastic organisation.