Apprenticeships

Lord Best Excerpts

Wednesday 26th March 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Best (CB)]

My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Young of Norwood Green, for instigating this debate and for stealing half my thunder by drawing attention to a report on construction industry apprenticeships which was released recently from a cross-party group of parliamentarians from both Houses, chaired jointly by the right honourable Nick Raynsford and myself. It was entitled No More Lost Generations: Creating Construction Jobs for Young People. If I only manage to impart one suggestion tonight to this House and to those outside who are following our debate, it is that everyone with an interest in the subject of apprenticeships should google “no more lost generations” and look at our report. It was written by Denise Chevin, supported by the Chartered Institute of Building and the Construction Industry Training Board, with input from the excellent charities doing great work—albeit on a small scale—to get young people into fulfilling construction jobs.

Our report highlights three stark facts. First, there are still well over 950,000 NEETs—young people between 16 and 24 years old not in employment, education or training. That figure was quoted by the noble Lord, Lord Young. Secondly, the construction industry is now expanding once again and will be creating 182,000 extra jobs alongside the need to recruit 400,000 building workers to replace those retiring over the next four years. Thirdly, despite these big numbers, there were only 7,280 completed apprenticeships in the sector last year, which was half the number of the year before. So we have 7,000 apprentices for a £100 billion-a-year industry that needs to draw in nearly 600,000 new workers by 2018.

In the absence of sufficient numbers of home-grown employees, the contractors—as they did for the construction of so many of the Olympic Games facilities—will import their labour from other countries, particularly from eastern Europe. I bow to no one in my admiration of building workers from Poland and the other A8 countries—the globalised labour market of the 21st century means that the skills of overseas workers can provide the construction industry with a labour force that provides quality at relatively low cost—but turning our backs on our own young people has huge financial and social costs. At the launch of our report, the deputy chair of the Construction Industry Training Board, Judy Lowe, quoted the extra cost to society of a NEET who never obtains a qualification or acquires the skills to hold down a proper job: £165,000. For young people who need the self-respect and sense of purpose that comes from being in employment, failure to acquire the necessary skills can lead to pretty miserable lives.

With the economy now recovering and the nation investing in construction in infrastructure—for example, Crossrail, HS2, power stations and, most labour-intensive of all, housing—we can get a double benefit by also creating the jobs that the young of this country need. Government support is vital. Training objectives need to be incorporated into public contracts. Moreover, the Chancellor has extended government support for housebuilding through the Help to Buy scheme, resulting in big jumps since the Budget of the share price of Persimmon, Bovis Homes, Taylor Wimpey and others. Perhaps the tit-for-tat should be a commitment from the housebuilders to skills training for home-grown talent.

Local authorities and housing associations can insist that companies bidding for their work must employ more apprentices. The use of planning requirements can support this. Local authorities also have the local contacts and local knowledge, crossing boundaries through the local enterprise partnerships, to be a focal point for initiatives that are tailored to the particular employers’ requirements in their locality.

To bring all this together and take forward the recommendations from the No More Lost Generations report, we called for a summit of construction leaders, convened by the Construction Industry Training Board and the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills. This could do for training what the 2001 construction summit did for safety. That summit led to a sea-change in attitudes to accidents and fatalities on building sites, to very great effect. A construction training summit would agree a new apprenticeship strategy, bringing together industry leaders, specialist contractors, housebuilders, local authorities, social landlords and central government. The response Nick Raynsford and I have received from the Construction Industry Training Board’s chairman, James Wates, has been very positive. The CITB is setting up an apprenticeship commission to take forward this plan and report to a construction training summit.

We have also had a positive response from BIS Secretary of State Vince Cable. His sympathy for these aims is well known and I hope he will agree to jointly sponsor the construction leaders summit later this year. What is certain is that it would be the height of folly not to use the revival of construction in the UK to provide fulfilling careers for tens of thousands of our young people who must not be another “lost generation”.