Economic Prosperity and Employment

Lord Bradshaw Excerpts

Thursday 18th July 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bradshaw]

I, too, add my thanks to the noble Lord, Lord Haskel. I am going to take a rather different line from some noble Lords. I have worked in industries which employ engineers. Engineers were my colleagues. They were highly respected. Over my career I have seen that respect for engineers go down and down so that now the engineer is lucky if he sits at the top table because it is crowded out with people qualified in finance, human resources and other things, when it is the engineers who actually drive our businesses forward.

Several noble Lords have referred to the list of apprentices and how the number is increasing. I ask you to look very carefully at who these apprentices are. They are not technically trained. There are people with apprenticeships in things like catering, business services and law, but those are not the skills which drive the economy forward in the way that I think we all want. I also want to comment on our professional institutions. The professional engineering institutions went through a period where they insisted on graduate entry, yet many of my colleagues started their careers as premium apprentices, took their higher national certificate, got practical experience and then qualified as professional engineers. Fortunately, that approach appears to be coming back—at the Institution of Mechanical Engineers, for example—because people need to know what they are doing. I want to draw to your Lordships’ attention the paucity of maths and physics teaching in schools. It is awful in many schools and there are so few students actually studying these subjects. Without an understanding of these subjects, we are not going to be able to provide the engine for the growth which all of us desire.

I was struck by the question that the noble Lord, Lord Bhattacharyya, raised about evaluation. Many large infrastructure projects of the sort which are being discussed here are judged on the values of time. This is an old system that was invented to evaluate rival road schemes in the 1970s. It was overseen by an organisation called the Standing Committee on Trunk Road Assessment, and it forms the basis of a lot of Treasury thinking. If you can prove that you can save 10 minutes going to Birmingham or a few minutes by putting an extra lane on the motorway, that will often be the deciding factor. However, if you build an extra lane, say on the M25, and at the end of three years you still have congestion as bad as when you started, I cannot see that that value of time is delivering a measurable quantity. On a visit to city hall this week I was heartened to hear that the Mayor of London is saying to people, “Are we creating jobs and building houses? Are we doing good?”, not focusing on how much time people are saving in whatever they happen to be doing.

We need to have a target for funding registered technicians. We should look very carefully at where the money spent on apprenticeships is going and make sure that enough of it is going towards engineering technicians. We are not going to re-equip our railways, modernise our water system, build new power stations or engage in fracking unless we have the skills here or we import them. The Government have more or less set their face against immigrant labour, so we have an urgent task in encouraging some indigenous labour to do the job. Finally, we really have to recognise the status of the engineer and his value to the community.