Technology and People: Deloitte Report

Lord Haskel Excerpts

Wednesday 13th April 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Haskel (Lab)]

My Lords, when I was a student, my job was to be a bus conductor. It was not a bad job: you got lots of exercise running up and down the stairs and you met people. It was the number 8 bus from Salford to Little Hulton—maybe one or two noble Lords have ridden it. Of course, that job was pretty soon automated. Fairly soon, the driver’s job will be automated, too. Yes, this should improve the service, making it more reliable and perhaps more frequent, leading to more jobs—and not only for those who maintain and look after the buses. I imagine the public will want somebody on the bus for the reasons that the noble Lord, Lord Rees, explained. They will not just make do with the chatbot we were told about by the noble Lord, Lord Patten.

Many noble Lords spoke about education. How are we to prepare people for being this new kind of bus conductor? It is certainly not by making all schools academies. The noble Lord, Lord Fox, made that point. It is just dogma. Converting them to the university technical colleges of the noble Lord, Lord Baker, would be a big step in the right direction because the new bus conductors will need some understanding of robotics, artificial intelligence, satellite navigation, electrical engineering and transport technology, as well as having the warm and welcoming personality and manner to make the passengers feel welcome and good. You must prepare people to be part of the great job-creating machine in the Deloitte report. Yes, technology is creating more jobs but the jobs are very different.

It is particularly important that we get this right because many businesses and more and more self-employed people use website platforms and apps to access the services and products that this report speaks about. As well as seeing that education and training adapt, we in Parliament must also make sure that the Government adapt to this. However, in his recent report Sir Charles Bean produced some interesting examples where people using internet platforms and apps to conduct their business seemed to be doing so in a vacuum. The work did not appear in our national figures. It is too intangible. Ministers really must get a grip on this. If we do not know what is going on in our economy, some of the real benefits may well pass us by—especially as this type of work must be one route to solving our productivity puzzle, and productivity went down in the last quarter of 2015.

Early automation replaced brawn with machine. What is happening now is that we are replacing brain with machines with artificial intelligence. I agree with my noble friend Lord Giddens that we do not really know what the outcome will be. However, according to the Bank of England, 15 million jobs in this country are at risk. So the matters raised in this report are not just issues for the market to resolve—I do not agree with the noble Lord, Lord Patten, on that—they are also issues for the Government to address through an industrial strategy. I agree that a strategy is an act of faith—faith that it will lead not only to a stronger economy but to the betterment of our society, a better standard of living, better quality of life and less inequality. But unless we both have a strategy and really know what is going on in our economy, dare I say that we are in real danger of missing the bus?