Digital Skills (Select Committee Report)

Lord Foster of Bath Excerpts

Monday 13th June 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Foster of Bath (LD)]

My Lords, I am delighted to follow the noble Lord, Lord Macdonald, who served as a member of the committee—or the flock, as my noble friend Lord Kirkwood put it. I begin by congratulating the noble Baroness, Lady Morgan, on the work she has done and acknowledging that in a brief contribution it is simply not possible to do justice to such an excellent and wide-ranging report.

One thing is clear from the contributions we have already had, and it will no doubt be echoed in those which are to follow. There seems to be unanimity in your Lordships’ House that we are living in a rapidly changing world and a rapidly changing world of work, a world in which skills, and digital skills in particular, are the currency of the 21st-century labour market. As we deal with that digital revolution and the revolution in artificial intelligence that is coming rapidly up behind it, it is clear that we need people with digital skills to help UK plc keep pace and thrive. Frankly, we simply do not have enough of them. That is why we need that digital skills revolution and, as the report so eloquently puts it, a single digital agenda without which the economic future looks rather bleak.

The noble Lord, Lord Knight, referred to the Tinder Foundation, which he chairs. He will be well aware that, together with Go ON UK, it carried out research which demonstrates not only the scale of the task but the real benefit of us tackling it. It looked into the social and economic impact of a lack of digital skills on both the individual and the country as a whole. The report calculated that the cost of investment in skills and devices would be £1.65 billion up to 2025, but it showed that the benefit to individuals and the country would amount to £14.3 billion over the same period; a cost-benefit ratio of almost £10 for every £1 invested. Clearly it is an investment worth making.

There is no shortage of suggestions about how we should move forward or of reports. As we have already heard, only today the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee issued its report Digital Skills Crisis, which talks of the need for a step change to halt the digital skills crisis and bring an end to digital exclusion once and for all. It clearly echoes the views of your Lordships’ Select Committee.

The timing of our debate is particularly fortuitous because it precedes the publication of the Government’s long-awaited digital strategy. I suppose we can only hope that the only reason it has not yet appeared in the Downing Street grid is that Mr Ed Vaizey was determined to hear the pearls of wisdom from your Lordships before finalising it. I hope we will see it soon. That is what so many of the reports say. They all have a number of common threads. They all say that currently we have a pretty good record. For instance, they recognise that, helped by our amazingly successful creative industries, we have the largest digital economy in the G20. As the Government’s response states, we are a founding member of D5, the network of some of the most digitally advanced Governments in the world, and we are also becoming a major attraction for inward investment. Venture capital in London’s tech companies is now 20 times what it was just five years ago. However, all the reports are clear: that record is at risk. We have heard many statistics today showing that, for instance, 16% of the population remain offline; 23% of adults, half of them working age, do not have the required level of basic digital skills; 90% of all new jobs require digital skills, not just in some niche area, as the noble Lord, Lord Knight, said, but across all sectors; and, crucially, nearly three-quarters of large UK companies say they are suffering from a gap in digital skills.

The reports are all clear that this is a constraint to growth and must be addressed. Rightly, they all point to some excellent work that is already being carried out by Google’s Digital Garage Academy, Creative Skillset, the BBC and many others, on which we can build. However, they all point to work that needs to be done right across all sectors, in schools, colleges, apprenticeship schemes, universities and businesses, not forgetting the work with SMEs in attracting more women, as we heard, and in ensuring that we have the digital infrastructure. As we heard earlier, from the noble Lord, Lord Janvrin, there is also the whole issue of lifelong learning.

I have time to touch on only two subjects, schools and infrastructure. In schools, while I welcome our new world-beating computing curriculum, of which we should all be very proud, we should also acknowledge that, as the noble Baroness, Lady Harding, said earlier, we need to achieve universal digital literacy. That means we need to place digital and technology skills alongside literacy and numeracy as the three building blocks of all education and employment.

There is another matter that is not touched on enough. Here I echo the remarks by other Members about our education system, which is currently so content-heavy. There is a real problem in our schools at the moment. We still have the industrial revolution model of,

“Ram it in, ram it in!

Children’s heads are hollow.

Ram it in, ram it in!

Still there’s more to follow”.

We need to be concentrating on creativity, imagination, innovation and risk-taking. One great thing we can do is to use the digital revolution and the technologies that it has presented in our schools to help us to achieve that, with much more individualised learning. An individualised learning approach could, for example, go out of its way to help children with special educational needs. However, we also have to pick up the point made by others about the chronic shortage of qualified confident ICT teachers, and recognise that many of those who are in post do not have appropriate qualifications. We need to recruit and train more specialist ICT teachers, and to provide those already in post with improved continuing professional development.

The Commons report today makes another important point not covered in your Lordships’ report:

“Given that digital skills are of the highest priority to the future of the UK economy and the future chances of young people, we find it surprising that computing is not explicitly considered in Ofsted’s schools inspection framework”.

The committee goes on to recommend that it should be. I agree, and I would be interested to hear the Minister’s response to this idea. I certainly hope she will respond supportively.

On my second chosen area, infrastructure, I am concerned that we have a lack of ambition. Clearly so is the committee, referring to the claim of 10 million UK premises, homes and businesses currently unable to access superfast broadband, and quoting the Times, for instance, saying that the UK’s broadband speeds are stuck in the slow lane. The response that we currently have from the Government seems very limited: a universal service obligation of just 10 megabits per second, way behind what some other countries are offering. We need to do better and to be more ambitious, and we need to adopt the approach of the committee, which defines the internet as a utility service available for all to access and use. To achieve that, we need to pick up a point, which again was raised by other noble Lords—we need to concentrate on demand stimulation. If more people understood the benefits they can get from high-speed broadband, more people will take it up and the unit costs will go down. There are many ways of doing that: one great example is the BBC iPlayer, which has driven up demand.

I want to end by asking the Minister two questions about the BBC which are relevant to this debate. Earlier the Minister announced that there was a settlement for BBC money that would be earmarked for assistance with broadband rollout. Yet more recently she announced in your Lordships’ House the establishment of a contestable fund for programme production which will use £20 million of unallocated funds from within that earmarked BBC money. Money that was originally earmarked for broadband rollout will now be used for what I have to describe as a pet government project. Can the Minister explain why the Government have put that pet project ahead of getting on with the vital issue of broadband rollout?

My second question is on upskilling and demand management. The existing BBC charter has within it a digital purpose. Part of that requires the BBC to take,

“a leading role in the switchover to digital television”.

Clearly, that has been done very successfully and does not need to be replicated in the new charter. However, the other part of the digital purpose says that the BBC,

“in promoting its other purposes”,

should be,

“helping to deliver to the public the benefit of emerging communications technologies and services”.

The recent BBC White Paper makes no reference to any similar purpose for the BBC in the future. Can the Minister explain why not and will she at least confirm that the BBC will continue to have a role in research and development and technological innovation, and that nothing in the new charter will prevent the BBC continuing its excellent work to drive digital take-up and skills with developments and initiatives such as Make it Digital, which has reached 23 million people so far, or its digital traineeships for young unemployed people?

I hope that the excellent Select Committee report, and several others that echo its recommendations, will have significantly influenced the Government’s digital strategy, and I hope that we will not have to wait much longer to find out.