Apprenticeships

Lord Haughey Excerpts

Wednesday 26th March 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Haughey (Lab)]

I begin by thanking my noble friend Lord Young for posing this Question today. The key word in the Question is “quality”. Some of the statistics that have been mentioned tonight may not relate to apprenticeships as we know them. My noble friend said earlier that some of these courses may be for only one year, and judging by some of the things that I have read in the past few weeks, some of the courses are for only six or 12 weeks, so I do not know how they can be billed as apprenticeships. A lot of people think that many apprenticeships have been watered down.

As someone who benefited from an engineering apprenticeship and is very proud to speak as the third member of the Glasgow apprenticeship union, the achievement of which I am most proud is that, over the past 20 years, I have managed through my own business to create 350 apprenticeship placements. Most of these people still work in the business today.

Some of these short-term training programmes presented as apprenticeships are very misleading. We will probably find that the 480,000 apprenticeships created over the past five years will not reflect the quality of the 480,000 or 500,000 in the previous five years. It is nothing short of tragic that 900,000 young people find themselves unemployed today. We have to create hope for these young people. It is due to the lack of opportunities that so many still find themselves out of work.

The biggest concern for me has already been mentioned: the decline in apprenticeships in the construction industry. The building of houses used to be a barometer of how the economy was doing—as my noble friend Lord Best mentioned. I read with interest in the last few days of the huge increase in the profits of builders and developers due to the Government’s guarantee scheme. Surely, we must be able to use this as a lever to guarantee apprenticeships in that industry.

Today, I sat through a debate on the Green Deal. I have to declare an interest here: I am involved in that sector. This initiative should absolutely have guaranteed thousands of new jobs in the central heating and cavity wall insulation industries. Unfortunately, that scheme is falling apart; day by day, it is becoming unworkable. I urge the Minister to revisit and have a look at what the Green Deal and the ECO deal were supposed to do in relation to apprenticeships.

Rather than having a go at the Minister, I would like to propose a suggestion to him. The Green Deal and the ECO deal have not worked, and there are more than 200,000 buildings in the UK that are more than 50,000 square feet. We have carried out a scientific test in our own building in Glasgow. If we created a position for a young apprentice energy champion in every building throughout the UK, the Government could award carbon credits or tax credits to the companies and we could create hundreds of thousands of jobs overnight—cost neutral. We have had a young energy champion in place in our building in Glasgow for the past nine months, working with Strathclyde University. We have done tests and we are saving between £8,000 and £12,000 a year. We pay the young person £15,000 a year. This is only by going about, turning off computers and switching off switches. He has also done something absolutely amazing: there are 900 people in my building who now think about energy efficiency every day. I urge the Government to have a look at this. This is a way in which we can generate jobs and give hope to 900,000 young people.

The great thing about this scheme is that it is an equal opportunities scheme. We have heard today about the lack of girls taking up apprenticeships. This scheme also could lead, through training, to that young person progressing from an energy champion to a fully qualified facilities manager earning perhaps £25,000 a year.