Trade (Australia and New Zealand) Bill

Lord Liddle Excerpts

2nd reading
Monday 9th January 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Liddle (Lab)]

My Lords, I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Swire, on a most charming maiden speech. Of course on these Benches we welcome the fact that these agreements with our Commonwealth allies in Australia and New Zealand have been concluded.

I mention right at the start one positive aspect of these agreements, which does not have much to do with trade directly but which I think is important: the mobility provisions for young people. The idea that they can spend up to three years as under-35 year-olds, and working at the same time—not just as students—seems a welcome approach to mobility and a very good thing. I hope that this kind of agreement will be matched in future in relations between the UK and the European Union.

I would also like to welcome the noble Lord, Lord Johnson, to his place. I greatly admired the bravado with which he spoke in favour of his Government’s negotiation of these agreements. There is, however, one obvious and, I am afraid, difficult question that I have to ask him. If these benefits are as overwhelming as he described—if billions of pounds of opportunities are being created—why did the impact assessment that went along with the parliamentary papers on these agreements suggest that the Australian agreement would increase our GDP by 0.08% and the New Zealand agreement by 0.03%?

I do not understand this obvious contradiction; I wonder whether the Minister will explain it to us in his reply. Is it because the benefits of these agreements are, in the Australian case, overwhelmingly on the Australian side? I read a lot of gossip about what is going on in the Conservative Party; it is said by some people that the reason why these agreements were concluded so quickly, and at such obvious disadvantage to UK interests overall, was because Liz Truss wanted to be able to claim to Conservative members that she was successfully getting trade agreements in order to be a champion of Brexit. I do not know about that but, if it is what lies behind this contradiction, it is an absolute disgrace.

The noble Lord, Lord Frost, who is no longer in his place, possibly has an explanation for the low economic benefits: that, because of agricultural interests in this country, we have put a brake on the potential for achieving the benefits of agricultural liberalisation. We need a national debate about this; it is a very important issue. I come from Cumberland and I know that its hill farmers earn very little: £10,000 to £15,000 per year. They are among the most hard-working, low-paid workers in the country. The noble Lord, Lord Frost—I wish he were still here—talked of how they would have to adjust. In what ways would they have to adjust and what would be the social and environmental costs, as well as the costs to the traditions that they have pursued for generations? We would like to hear answers from the Government on that question.

I support very strongly what my noble friend Lady Liddell said in her excellent opening contribution about how we are weaker as a result of not having subjected these agreements to proper parliamentary scrutiny. If we want a proper debate about how much we are prepared to liberalise, the Government will have to be much more open with the public about the trade-offs in this situation. Yet, particularly with the Australia agreement, what we saw instead was an attempt to hide from Parliament what it was all about.

When we had the discussions on the Trade Bill post Brexit, we were made promises. I remember David Davis coming along to our Select Committee and saying, “Of course, the UK Parliament will have the same rights as the European Parliament to scrutiny”. What a joke. I worked in Brussels in the Trade Commissioner’s cabinet when Peter Mandelson was Commissioner. One of my jobs was to maintain close relations with the trade committee of the European Parliament. These were very expert people who understood the issues properly, they had to approve a mandate for every negotiation, they had to be kept informed at every stage of negotiation, and the European Parliament as a whole had a vote on whether what had been agreed should go ahead. We have none of those provisions. Is it not absurd that trade agreements should be ratified on the basis of a resolution procedure, rather than something that offers the possibility of serious debate, in which amendments might be moved and different positions taken? If the Government are serious about trade and the difficult choices in trade, they have to be much more forward in their willingness to open these matters to scrutiny.

Finally, I very much agree with the remarks from noble Lord, Lord Kerr, about the absence of a credible trade strategy. We now know that we have lost considerably as a result of leaving the single market: something like a 14% trade loss—we know that is a fact. The Government cannot argue with that; the statistics are all there and obvious. How will we make up for that loss? We know the United States is not interested in an agreement. We know that with China, if anything, our economic relations are becoming more distant, not closer, and that is likely to be a trend. Indeed, one of the reasons farmers worry about the implications of these agreements is that if New Zealand was no longer able to export its lamb to China—Australia has already had difficulties—then it would find its way to the United Kingdom, flood the market and cause immense difficulties for our own farmers. Where are we on that question?

Where are we on India? Is there really any serious prospect of an India trade deal? If the Government regard as one of their top priorities stopping small boats, they are never going to agree to the thousands of visas that the Indians will want in return for trade concessions for us. That is, basically, the basis of the deal. If immigration matters to the extent that the Government make it their top priority, I am afraid we will never have a trade deal with India.

I do not know what the strategy is, and I think it is high time that the Government produced one. I hope the Minister, whom I greatly welcome to his place, will provide us with some answers in his summing up.

Skills and Post-16 Education Bill [HL]

Lord Liddle Excerpts

Committee stage
Thursday 15th July 2021 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Morris of Yardley (Lab)]

I rise to support this amendment. This is such an important issue, but I can see that is difficult as well.

When I started teaching, which was many years ago, in Coventry, it was very clear which provider offered which course. The advantage was that it was very straightforward for children and schools to know where to go for catering, engineering, electronics or whatever. The disadvantage was that it squeezed out competition, which can raise standards and creativity. It is somehow getting that balance that we are looking for. I would welcome the Minister explaining how far the Government are prepared to go to make sure that there is some sort of co-ordinated provision within each skills partnership. It makes sense to allow providers to play to their strengths and it is also essential that courses that might not be economically viable but are important for the local or indeed the national economy are supported to stay open and be made available. So it is a tricky issue and I cannot recall so far in the debate on this amendment hearing the Minister outline the Government’s views on this.

To bring universities in, my noble friend Lady Wilcox made a very strong point. In the old days, it was just further education courses that were co-ordinated, but now we have a growth in private providers and universities in these contested levels as well. So in the name of clarity for students and users, and for the needs of the economy, we need some guidance from the Government about a co-ordinated approach, making sure all areas are covered. Basically, what happens is that all providers want to provide the cheap courses, and the machinery-heavy courses do not get offered. Schools are happy to go into vocational work, as long as it is classroom-based and they do not need specialist teachers. That very often leaves the college with the courses that need highly specialised tutors and heavy equipment. I would welcome the Minister somehow making sense of all that in her comments.

[Lord Liddle (Lab)]

I support what my noble friends Lady Wilcox and Lady Morris have said. I strongly support the case for more co-ordination. It is not clear to me, in the Bill, how this is going to work, and I would like to hear an explanation from the Minister of how she thinks co-ordination will be made to work at a local level. The idea that a Secretary of State sitting in London can get into the question of which school should offer which course and how we deal with the problem that my noble friend Lady Morris described is not going to work.

There is the Education and Skills Funding Agency. In the period when I briefly had something to do with it—when I was advising my noble friend Lord Mandelson, when he was Business Secretary in charge of skills—I did not get the impression that that body had the capacity to do this job of co-ordination. It was basically responsible for making sure that public money was handled in an accountable way. What I would love to hear from the noble Baroness is an explanation of how central government intends to approach this question of co-ordination at local level. In my view—and here there is a big lacuna in the Bill—this is most effectively done by councils and mayoral authorities. It should be a devolved matter; it is an opportunity, in my view, to strengthen devolution within England. I do not sense that the noble Baroness shares that view. Perhaps she will explain to us, if she does not share that view, how she thinks this task of co-ordination will be carried out.

[Baroness Whitaker (Lab)]

My Lords, I intended to support Amendment 40A. I am not sure whether the noble Lord, Lord Baker, intends to move it. Has it dropped out of the system? I was not informed.

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[The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Lord Rogan) (UUP)]

The noble Lord, Lord Adonis, is not in the Chamber so I call the noble Lord, Lord Liddle.

[Lord Liddle (Lab)]

My Lords, I support this amendment. However, I would just like to say, with great respect to the noble Baroness, that she did not answer the question I asked her on the first amendment. Nor was it a great reassurance to me to be told that Cumbria has been chosen as one of the pilot areas and responsibility placed in the hands of the chamber of commerce. I will explain that in a moment because it is relevant to this amendment.

If you are to have an effective local body that represents private sector and public sector employer interests, first, it has to have a clarity of focus on a particular labour market and, secondly, it has to be broadly representative of the businesses in the area. The chamber of commerce in Cumbria, taking this as an example, does a lot of good work with SMEs. It does a lot of training. It basically finances itself through doing local training courses for junior and middle managers, I would say. However, it has absolutely no connection with our major employers in the county: Vickers in Barrow, or the nuclear industry in west Cumbria—that is 20,000 workers to start with. In the area that I represent in Cumbria, there is a firm called Innovia, although its ownership has changed, that makes plastic films and employs about 1,000 people in a small town, but again it has very little connection with the chamber of commerce. The same would be true of the big firms in Carlisle such as Pirelli, which manufactures tyres, and Carr’s, which is now part of a wider biscuit group. I do this little bit of local storytelling because I do not think that putting skills planning in the hands of a chamber of commerce will prove to be a satisfactory solution. I want to see an employer-led approach—I agree with that—but we need to think about how we make this work more deeply than it seems to me the Government have. The areas do have to be relevant.

That is all I have to say, although I could add one point. In 2010, the coalition Government abolished the regional development agencies on the basis that they were not sufficiently employer led and that they were too bureaucratic and covered too big an area. They replaced them with something called local enterprise partnerships. These were intended to be employer led. Initially, in Cumbria everybody said, “Good idea: let’s have the chamber of commerce being the main private sector representative.” Eventually—and this is not a party-political thing at all—it was recognised all round that this body did not actually represent the proper mix of big and small employers. We have a reasonably effective local enterprise partnership running, chaired by the noble Lord, Lord Inglewood—one of the great figures of Cumbria who was a Member of the European Parliament on two separate occasions for the north-west area. He has tremendous local credibility and does a very good job. The LEP has looked at skills and done a lot of work on skills. I hear no mention of what the Government intend to do with local enterprise partnerships. They seem to be too scared to say, or too unwilling to say. I do not know quite what is going on there. I have no confidence that the Government have a grip on this. On the principle that there should be a strong, employer-led presence in determining skills policy, I totally accept that. But I just do not think the Government have thought it through.

[The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Lord Rogan) (UUP)]

I call the noble Lord, Lord Young of Norwood Green. The noble Lord is not online, so I call the noble Baroness, Lady Morris of Yardley.

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[Lord Liddle (Lab)]

I wholly support what my noble friend Lady Morris has said. There is an emphasis on local skills plans, but even if they are working well with good representation from across the board of employers, we are not certain in the Government’s plans how that will happen. So the first problem is whether these bodies will be representative. The second problem is whether they will have the capacity. My fear—which was raised by the noble Lord, Lord Lucas—is that even if they are good at it, they will focus on present needs rather than future ones. In a rapidly evolving economy, with artificial intelligence changing everything in the next 10 or 20 years, our education and skills system has to have some leadership from the centre to indicate how education and skills needs are going to change.

There is nothing terribly socialist about this kind of idea. When it comes to government investment in research and innovation, we have elaborate national structures that look at what the key technologies are going to be and invest in what they decide are likely to be the key innovations of the future. If you are doing that with technology and science, do you not also have to think in those terms for education and skills? I find no evidence in this Bill that the Department for Education—I am not going to criticise Ministers—has that long-term vision.

[Baroness Sheehan (LD)]

My Lords, I speak to Amendment 85 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, and the noble Baronesses, Lady Hayman and Lady Blackstone, to which I have added my name. Before doing so, I should say that I support Amendments 15 and 33 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, and my noble friend Lady Garden of Frognal. I agree with all the remarks that have been made to date in this group.

I do not often quote a former Conservative Education Secretary so I will take this opportunity to do so, not least because I am in complete agreement with what he says. In the debate last Tuesday, the noble Lord, Lord Baker of Dorking, asked:

“How can you fashion an education system if you have no idea what your national economy wants in the way of skilled workers?”—[Official Report, 6/7/21; col. 1236.]


I suppose it is a rhetorical question but it one against which there can be very little argument, particularly given the turmoil of the previous 16 months when the workplace has been turned on its head and changes to working practices that had appeared decades away happened, quite literally, overnight.

There is in addition the urgency of the transformative overhaul that we now know to be necessary to align all sectors of the economy to net-zero targets for carbon and our biodiversity goals. The green jobs task force, which was set up under the 10-point plan, published a report just yesterday—one of a raft of relevant government reports—which says:

“The conclusion reached by this assessment of the evidence is that, if the UK is to grasp the opportunities afforded by a green industrial revolution, we must develop a comprehensive and holistic view of the green jobs and skills challenge.”


A few paragraphs later the report recommends:

“A UK-wide body, including representation from national government and industry, should therefore be established to maintain momentum and coherence in the workforce transition, supported by action from local bodies.”


To me, that reads like a call for a national strategic skills audit, with a focus on aligning with our climate change and biodiversity targets. I think that Amendment 85 would meet that recommendation rather neatly. The purpose of the amendment is to create a structure for an expert panel to provide strategic, evidence-based advice on the skills that employers need now and in future, through a skills audit. It would allow the expert panel to assess economic, social and technical levers, and to disseminate high-quality information to key stakeholders. That in turn would allow all stakeholders, including learners and workers, to make well-informed decisions to support a robust green economic recovery, and would ensure that future skills and qualifications are aligned with the net-zero and nature-positive economy. Lastly, a three-yearly review would keep it up to date and relevant.

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[Lord Young of Norwood Green (Lab) [V]]

My Lords, I find myself in a difficult situation with these amendments. I listened carefully to the Minister responding to the last group of amendments, and I feel that she was right: a lot of what noble Lords are rightly concerned about ought to appear in the guidance. I do not want the Bill to be overly complicated, with every prescriptive concern, but I do want an assurance from the Minister that the guidance will address some of the valid points made by the noble Lord, Lord Aberdare, and others.

While I have the Floor, I am concerned about the view that, somehow, employers will not be looking ahead. That is not my experience of dealing with employers. They are concerned; they have had to look ahead. Like hanging, the pandemic has concentrated their minds wonderfully, but it was also happening beforehand. Look at all the work in establishing new standards, where employers are involved; they are taking into account their future skills needs and that new green skills will be required.

The Minister was right to remind us about the vitally important work that jobcentre coaches are doing. I would not say that I am absolutely satisfied they have got all of that right, but they are on the right track to ensuring that young people are aware of the skills that they will need in a job market that is changing significantly. We know what some of these are already; we know they need a reasonable standard of maths, English and digital skills—they are absolutely essential. Some of them are fully equipped, certainly on the digital skills front, while others will need some extra assistance and training. The Minister referred to lifelong learning, and we also have traineeships and Kickstart, so there are a number of things the Government are providing. Is everything working absolutely right? No, there are things that I believe—as I have said in a previous debate —need reform, and the apprenticeship levy is one.

I urge the House to be wary of trying to load up the Bill with every single detail. The Minister was right when she said that there is a role for guidance. If there needs to be a reference within the Bill to the fact that some of these points will be covered in the guidance, that is all well and good. I attach a lot of importance to the guidance.

I do not share the pessimism of some that this is a badly framed Bill that will not involve local people as it should. Of course we are going to go through a learning curve, as the participants in creating the local skills improvement plans develop the technique of doing this. What the Government should do on a national level is encourage best practice, looking at examples of where it has been done really well and passing that kind of information on. I suspect I may be in the minority here, but it is no bad thing to have a range of views. I hope that, when the Minister responds, she will take into account the points I have made—she has also made them before—about the balance of what is in guidance and what needs to be in the Bill.

[Lord Liddle (Lab)]

My Lords, we should all take notice of what my noble friend Lord Young of Norwood Green says on these matters. He has vast experience in this area, as a trade union official and as a Minister in the field in the last Labour Government, so I would not dismiss a word of what he says. However, I think he is being a little overgenerous about this Bill, which seems very vague in some of its key points.

We support—certainly I do, and I think my Front Bench does—the principle of a lifelong learning entitlement and reform to our qualifications structure to allow modules. That is a very important reform. We support a stronger role for employers in determining skills. All of that is fine at the level of high principle. The question is how this is going to work in practice. I still have very severe doubts about that. Here we are talking about the role of the Secretary of State in relation to the plans that are produced locally. Can the Minister tell us precisely what that role is going to be, because it relates to these amendments?

Skills and Post-16 Education Bill [HL]

Lord Liddle Excerpts

Committee stage
Tuesday 6th July 2021 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, and I have argued over so many things over so many years that it is not true but, I must say, that was a bravura performance. He raised some very important issues, particularly in relation to whether we need this legislation or whether legislation is being used as a substitute for strategy. I note in particular his point about the lack of funding for FE and the fact that there is a danger that this legislation will simply be a way of signalling an approach but not helping in practical terms. I thought that he did an excellent job; it was like the emperor’s new clothes being exposed there. However, I want to correct him on one point. We have not left Europe; we have left the EU. As a Brexiteer, I am a great fan and advocate of German vocational education, as a matter of fact.

First, I apologise for not speaking at Second Reading. My IT skills rather failed me; I should probably go on a course. I thought that I had listed myself online, but I had failed to press the right button.

I support the aspirations of this Bill. It is close to my heart because, as a former further education lecturer—a sector that is too often treated as a Cinderella sector—I hope that further education will at last arrive at the ball. However, ironically, aspects of this Bill could limit opportunities, which is one reason why I am particularly sympathetic to Amendments 1, 2 and 6 in this group and the remarks initiated by the noble Lord, Lord Lucas.

I want to avoid making a Second Reading speech. However, I want to make a broad point about a distinction that it is important to remember as we go through all the amendments on Report and which represents why I want the Bill to avoid being overly narrow or prescriptive about outcomes, as this can backfire and lead to unintended consequences. While we are focusing on the neglected areas of vocational qualifications, skills and training, one danger is that we assume that certain social groups of young people are just not cut out for academic education. In the skills and training discussion—that is, when we talk about how we can target people and help them with skills and training—it is too often assumed that we are talking about working-class youth. This is dangerously deterministic and has already put pressure on schools in certain social areas to see education as preparation for the labour market, which cuts against the principle of building a society or education based on merit.

To state it baldly, every child has a right to an academic education until the age of 16, in my opinion, and even if they choose not to pursue an academic route after that, they are entitled to be introduced to the best that is thought and known. This allows every young person, whether they end up as a plumber or a philosopher, access through schooling to a working knowledge of cultural capital, history, literature, the scientific method and so on. The trainee hairdressers and car mechanics to whom I taught literature were more than the jobs that they eventually acquired. We should be wary of a narrowly instrumental version of vocationalism, as it can limit opportunities and aspirations.

One concern that I have about the Bill is that it focuses too narrowly on the skills required by local employers; this has already been raised by the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, and the noble Lord, Lord Adonis. I mean no disrespect to them, but local employers can be short-term and short-sighted and do not always see the long view. As these amendments—the ones that I am supporting—emphasise, local employers may not always be best placed to see the bigger picture. In turn, that can narrow the options for students.

For example, take a geographical area traditionally associated with the fishing industry—an area in which I would like to see more investment in terms of apprenticeships and so on. Are we to assume that the locality will only ever need skills related to fishing? Also, there may well be more future-oriented skills that are not needed as yet but could create new industries, such as marine biology.

Of course, it sounds positive when the DfE says that the Bill will meet

“the need of local areas … so people no longer have to leave their home-towns to find great jobs.”

The noble Baroness, Lady Morris, made the point about place; I am very keen on remembering that. I like the soundbite about improving communities rather than just providing a ladder out of them, but it would also be wrong to confine people, or even trap them, into jobs related to the needs of the locality they live in. If you live in a largely agricultural area but aspire to be an engineer in car manufacturing, or to work in construction in the city, will you be able to access skills that allow you to move if we confine the skills available to those that only the local employers decide on? If you are an inner-city youth who dreams of working in farming, will you be able to access skills if local bosses cannot imagine ever needing or training someone to pursue such an agricultural career? Amendments 1 and 6 and their motivation by the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, tackle these issues and the potentially limiting anomalies in the Bill.

More generally, one of the ironies of focusing on catering for local needs is that it limits who decides on local priorities just to local employers. It takes power away not only from students locally, as has been mentioned, but from local civic leaders—we have heard about mayors being excluded—and local further education college principals. Tom Bewick, chief executive of the Federation of Awarding Bodies, calls this a top-down power grab on qualifications. He says:

“It is regrettable that the provisions in this Bill and the government’s wider qualifications review seeks to stifle investment, innovation and choice in the future by effectively nationalising technical qualifications via a Whitehall-driven, top-down, command and control approach.”


Certainly, as later amendments try to address, the Bill introduces new regulatory layers of approval which are politically controlled from the centre—for example, the need for the Secretary of State to approve the new statutory local skills improvement plans. The Bill claims to be local, but how local is it beyond the local employers?

I am also sympathetic to Amendment 81, tabled by the noble Baronesses, Lady Whitaker and Lady Greengross, and others, which addresses the attainment gap. The Bill is limited in supporting those who have not attained grade 4 or above in English. Simon Parkinson, the chief executive of the Workers’ Educational Association, noted that the Bill is

“quiet on support for any qualifications below Level 3”,

which

“offer many adult learners key progression routes”.

I am sympathetic to thinking about broadening this out.

Many years ago—probably decades now—I launched a return to learning course for women who had no qualifications. They were often young women, and I taught them a broad liberal arts course. I agree with the WEA that it is worrying that the Bill does little to support

“subjects outside a narrow band of technical disciplines”.

For the women who I taught, it was an introduction to literature, history and creative writing; no doubt local employers would think that a complete waste of time. But it actually allowed them to acquire confidence and skills—and ultimately, in some instances, a GCSE in English. It was a stepping stone to them taking training courses and reskilling, and many went on to be, for example, a nurse or a police officer. One did a course in animal husbandry. Another eventually ran a successful beauty business and earned a fortune.

My main takeaway from that is that we cannot be too prescriptive in what we want to achieve when we train people by narrowly saying that the only skills that matter are decided by local bosses. They might say “We’ll decide what skills we’ll need in this area into the future”, but lack any imagination to think beyond that. Sometimes non-training and non-skills education can lead people into the world of training and skills, and we should not neglect that either.

[Lord Liddle (Lab)]

My Lords, I am not sure I will be able to match the bravura performances that this Committee has already brought forward. I noted with great pleasure the speech of my noble friend Lord Adonis. I tried to make a speech like that at Second Reading. The only trouble is that at Second Reading you have five minutes, but being in Committee gives you much greater opportunity to expand as you wish.

For all the criticisms of the Bill, many of which I agree with, it does contain one major social reform which has the potential for improvement in the decade ahead: the extension of the student loan scheme to people doing training. We should all put on record clearly our welcome for that; it is very important.

I am no great expert in this field but I had a little encounter with it when I was involved, at the latter end of the Labour Government, with the North West Development Agency in my home area of Cumbria and saw the complexities of trying to improve the skills system. If the Committee will allow me, I would like to expand on that a little. It struck me that the problem with skills and further education was that provision was not demand-led but supply-led. It was led by people who wanted to fill the places on courses to get the money from the Skills Funding Agency to meet their costs. For it to be supply-led by the providers—not demand-led by the needs of employers and the country—is clearly not a satisfactory way of doing things, so reform is needed.

However, the Government are saying that they are going to create committees dominated by employers to solve this problem—well, we have had a bit of a history of that. The great selling point of the RDAs that Labour established was that they were private sector led. I actually think that was a great mistake; they should have been locally and democratically led. We then would have had, in my view, a much more solid basis for English devolution. We had the local enterprise partnerships established by the right honourable Sir Vincent Cable, which Members on the Liberal Democrat Benches will doubtless be anxious to applaud in these debates. Again, those partnerships were intended to put employers at the forefront of local economic development. We now have this proposal for local skills improvement plans, led by employers.

However, getting the employer voice in an area is very difficult. In Cumbria there are some very big employers. The noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, mentioned Barrow and British Aerospace, and there is Sellafield on the west coast of the old Cumberland. These very big employers need to have relationships with universities and colleges to provide a ladder of opportunity for their people, from apprenticeships to master’s degrees, in the areas that they need. That is not satisfactorily done but it is a way forward. I am not sure whether skills improvement plans will result in that, but that is what needs to be done with large employers.

Then there are big sectors in which there are small employers and generally unsatisfactory standards: typically, hospitality, in the private sector, and social care, in the quasi-public sector—often privately provided, of course. In those areas we need a national sectoral approach. There are probably several hundred local hotelkeepers in the Lake District; putting a couple of them on the skills improvement board is not going to solve the problem. We need some national sectoral approaches, particularly to the sectors where there are chronic skills shortages.

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Lastly, I will speak to Amendment 73, to which I have also added my name, along with the noble Baroness, Lady Sheehan. The Secretary of State is to keep a list of relevant providers. It does not seem a lot to insist that one of the conditions to be on this list is that the provider should be committed to tackling climate change and biodiversity loss by having created a strategy to do so that is made openly available by publishing it. I cannot think of any FE college given this challenge that would not want to rise to it—and it is true not only of FE colleges but of other providers in the skills training sector. So, once again, I hope the Government will take this seriously and come back with a response that will give us at least some hope of achieving in this Bill what I set out earlier in this short speech: the bringing together of education and climate change objectives.

[Lord Liddle (Lab)]

My Lords, I would very much like to support what the noble Baroness, Lady Blackstone, has just said, and I hope that the Government will find a way of bringing forward amendments that take into account the spirit of all the amendments that have been tabled. This is self-evidently necessary.

We have a great debate going on in part of government about how on earth we are going to replace our gas boilers, and there is a big debate about who is going to bear the cost. Is it going to fall disproportionately on the poor? Well, it is all very well having this theoretical debate, but what I am sure of is that there are not the people available with the skills to do this job within the five-year, 10-year or 15-year timeframe that has been talked about. The Government have to be more joined-up about these things if they are serious about addressing the climate challenge.

But there is a more general point here that exposes another potential weakness in this Bill. The emphasis of the Bill is on local skills improvement plans. This is looking at the present local situation, not at future requirements, and there has to be some means of injecting future requirements into the preparation of these local plans. The noble Baroness talked about the productivity and skills that are going to do this job for us, we hope. I welcome this, because I wholly agree with the noble Lord, Lord Baker of Dorking, said: it was a great mistake to abolish the UKCES; it was a very good body that produced very good work.

There are things such as skills gaps, and the fact is that, particularly with Brexit, with leaving the European Union, you would have thought that a Government determined to make a success of us having left the European Union would be looking at the skills consequences of our exit for the future. But what evidence is there that this is being done? We need to have a serious think not just about new skills required by climate change but about new skills that are necessary in our economy as a result of the changes we have imposed on ourselves.

[Lord Aberdare (CB)]

My Lords, I shall speak briefly on this group to express my support in particular for Amendment 25, in the names of my noble friend Lady Hayman and others, about the requirement for approved LSIPs to take account of “any national skills strategy”. I think the clue is in the “any”. I fully support that idea, and I am wondering how it could actually be met. The noble Lord, Lord Baker, pointed out some of the challenges in the absence of such a plan. I wonder whether the Minister can tell us anything about what sort of national or central co-ordination there will be and how that might work in terms of alignment with LSIPs. What sort of processes or feedback mechanisms will there be to ensure that there is that alignment, and indeed that it is clear what the LSIPs are seeking to align with? My noble friend described it as “joining the dots” with national strategy. What is the flow of communication in reporting and monitoring between LSIPs and the centre?

My noble friend Lady Hayman also talked about a cross-cutting, long-term, aspirational skills strategy, which would be splendid. The word that struck me there was “aspirational”, because the main challenge when I used to work with young Londoners on employability skills was their lack of aspiration and lack of knowledge of what to aspire to—which is why I was so passionate about careers education. Yet it is aspiration that has driven most successful education strategies in the past and created forward movement. This Bill is essentially an aspirational Bill, and that is why I welcome it quite strongly. So I suppose the question—which I am not sure whether I am asking the Minister or myself—is: how will it actually raise aspirations? And how can it build on young people’s enthusiasm, which the noble Baroness, Lady Blackstone, mentioned, for issues relating to climate change and biodiversity to create momentum that will feed in, hopefully, and perhaps through the LSIPs, to drive the objectives of the Bill?

The only other point I wanted to make is that I am rather less enamoured of Amendments 73 and 75 in this group, in the names of the noble Baroness, Lady Sheehan, and others, which would require independent training providers to have a climate change and sustainability strategy and a delivery plan. Many of those independent training providers are SMEs: they can be very small; they tend to specialise in certain areas; they are often operating with limited resources on extremely narrow margins. I am already concerned about some of the other conditions being suggested for them to be on the list, and this seems potentially disproportionate. I would certainly encourage them to have such a plan as far as it is relevant to them, but putting it on the face of the Bill would seem to be overkill.

Skills and Post-16 Education Bill [HL]

Lord Liddle Excerpts

2nd reading
Tuesday 15th June 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Liddle (Lab)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure as always to follow one of the interesting speeches of the noble Lord, Lord Cormack. However, on this occasion it is an even greater pleasure to congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Black of Strome, on her maiden speech. I have a bit of history with her: her current position is pro-vice-chancellor for engagement at Lancaster University, and when I was chair of the council I—along with others on the panel—appointed her. It was the easiest appointment I have ever made in my life, and that does not reflect on the quality of the other applicants. Sue is tremendous and she will make a great contribution to this House.

We are talking today about a very serious subject: that of decades of public policy failure on Britain’s part in education. We have made multiple efforts: the technical schools of the 1944 Act that never happened; the training boards that Labour established in the 1960s but were then thought unsatisfactory; and the learning and skills councils established by my noble friend Lord Blunkett but then abolished. There has been no stability of approach and no stable institutions, and we have huge problems.

I first came across this issue when I worked with my noble friend Lord Mandelson at the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills at the fag end of the Labour Government. We suddenly realised, based on the work of my noble friend Lord Sainsbury and his Gatsby Foundation, that we were facing a real crisis in technicians: if we were not able to have sufficiently highly qualified technicians, how could we be a successful economy working at the frontier of knowledge? We have heard today from the noble Lord, Lord Baker, about the lack of training in digital skills and computing. Another worry is construction. This Government, rightly, have huge ambitions for public investment—we are raising it from something like 2% to 4% of GDP—but if we do not have the workers how are they going to fulfil those ambitions?

I welcome the Bill. I would not say that the present Secretary of State for Education was one of the Conservatives whom I most admire—I admire many Conservatives, by the way—but I praise him for taking up the cause of further education. I hope his efforts will have more success than the past decades of failure.

One of the most shocking things that I have learned in this debate is from my noble friend Lord Layard, who had enormous influence over the policies of the Blair and Brown Governments, when he said that today we are in a situation where one-third of 18 year- olds are not in any form of education or training. That is a recipe for a low-pay, low-skill economy with massive inequalities for decades to come. It is a recipe for social disaster in the world of knowledge, advanced technology, artificial intelligence and all that which we are moving into. We have to do something about it.

The funding of lifelong learning, the introduction of modular courses and efforts to secure greater employer involvement are all admirable. However, there are a couple of matters about which I worry. First, I worry that the whole approach is too centralised. I have always been very sceptical of the Skills Funding Agency, which holds the whole system in an iron grip and does not allow for local flexibility and initiative. I would like mayors and combined authorities working with employers to develop skills improvement plans on a localised basis in England. Secondly, the education system needs collaboration, not polarisation. I saw this at Lancaster, a very good university, where we had a very good partnership with Barrow’s college of further education to train graduate engineers for the Vickers yard.

Such collaboration between colleges and universities should be strengthened; we should not be trying to force the systems apart. That is very important. I worry that we are allowing ourselves to think that university expansion has reached its limit. We in this country are supposed to admire places like Asia. Well, in places such as South Korea something like 70% of children are going to university, so do not let us have any artificial limits.

I shall make a final point. We must be prepared to put public money into this. We can make choices about it, but I think personally that my own party’s commitment to abolish tuition fees is ridiculous, given the amount of money that we have to spend on other aspects of education. On the government side, the Conservatives have to recognise that further education and apprenticeships have been an area of massive underfunding. We need a joint commitment to create stable institutions and to provide the funding that will lead to a transformation in this field.

Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities

Lord Liddle Excerpts

Wednesday 21st April 2021 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Berridge (Con)]

My Lords, the commission outlined a number of reviews, including those that the noble Baroness outlined, and they were broadly in agreement with many of them. They took the recommendations of the Lammy review seriously, many of which have already been put into effect and others are in train. I shall come back to her on her kind offer of a meeting.

[Lord Liddle (Lab) [V]]

My Lords, I will go back to the question asked by the noble Lord, Lord Hannan. Do the Government regret the manner in which this report was pre-briefed by No. 10 in what looked like a deliberate attempt to stir up controversy with independent scholars and lifelong campaigners who have worked to eradicate the scourge of racism from our society? What is to be gained by pursuing these culture wars? Should action in future not be based on objective evidence? If that is the case and we are basing action on objective evidence, why did the Minister not welcome the plea from the noble Lord, Lord Bilimoria, for companies to be required to publish data on ethnic-minority pay gaps between people with equivalent qualifications and abilities? Surely we have to make progress this way.

[Baroness Berridge (Con)]

My Lords, it is deeply regrettable, as I have outlined, that reading many of the media reports and the commission’s report is like moving from one planet to another. The commission had its own independent communications advice and no one wants to see an issue go from robust disagreement —which is what we have always had a strong history of in this country—to personal abuse directed at various individuals who have given their time for nothing. As I have outlined, we agree that there should not be an ethnicity pay gap, but we disagree about the mechanism to change that. The history of our politics is that we agree on the ends, but disagree on the means to get there.

Higher Education (Fee Limits and Student Support) (England) (Coronavirus) (Revocation) Regulations 2020

Lord Liddle Excerpts

Thursday 29th October 2020 Grand Committee

[Lord Liddle (Lab)]

My Lords, I welcome this statutory instrument as drawing a line under a particular chapter of confusion in government policy. The real question I want to put to the Minister is: what is going to happen next? What is the government’s future policy on fees and student numbers? At the moment, we have a higher education sector that has no certainty about the financial perspective in which it operates, and there is a duty on the Government to show greater clarity.

I have some sympathy with what the noble Lord, Lord Forsyth of Drumlean, said about whether students should pay the full fee in the present difficult circumstances. However, just to cut the fee alone and do nothing else would gravely damage the financial position of one of the most successful sectors in Britain: the university sector. What we need is comprehensive reform. We need more teaching grant, because that is the only way to compensate for a reduction in fee. As the noble Lord, Lord Forsyth, mentioned, because of the difficulty students have in getting jobs, we need the reintroduction of maintenance loans.

I am an enthusiast for universities. I was, until recently, the chair of Lancaster University. I agree totally with the noble Baroness, Lady Gardner of Parkes, that we need to get more people into university, but we will not do that successfully unless we have a long-term, sustainable funding model, and that is just totally unclear at present.

Education Settings: Autumn Opening

Lord Liddle Excerpts

Wednesday 8th July 2020 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Berridge]

My Lords, the laptops are the property of the local authority or the multi-academy trust; when they were loaned out to students, it was of course expected that they would be returned. Tens of thousands of 4G wireless routers went out as well, because we recognise the problem that wi-fi can be patchy, if not non-existent, in certain parts of the country.

[Lord Liddle (Lab)]

My Lords, I greatly welcome the £1 billion catch-up package mentioned in the Statement. But I know from experience of the way in which government works that there is a big gap between allocating a sum of money and ensuring that it actually reaches those schools in the most deprived neighbourhoods and the children who are most at risk of being left badly behind. How are the Government addressing this question? What sources of information are being used? Are local authorities involved as sources of advice on where the money could be best allocated? On the tutoring programme, are the Government considering innovative methods of delivery, such as those pioneered by Teach First in the last decade and more?

[Baroness Berridge]

The noble Lord is correct. When you have £1 billion, it is important to make sure that it gets to where it needs to go and delivers what it should. That is why £650 million will go directly to schools. Part of that is to enable them to purchase the subsidised tutoring. We trust the school system; giving the majority of the money to the schools is best. Only they know who, of the pupils in front of them, need what. We will publish further details on the £350 million for the national tutoring service. We are looking at making the best use of that money, including remote learning, without forgetting that, in certain schools, there will be a demand for a physical presence. There will be flexibility in that fund. Noble Lords will learn more about the £350 million tutoring fund soon.

Trade Bill

Lord Liddle Excerpts

Committee: 3rd sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Wednesday 30th January 2019 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Fairhead]

It is of course for the EU to determine what they recognise. Our priority for the EU/UK trading relationship is for it to be as frictionless as possible. What the UK has proposed is no tariffs, no quotas, no routine requirements for rules of origin for goods traded between the UK and the EU, and cumulation provisions with trading partners. Clearly the final outcome will be for negotiation between the UK and the EU.

[Lord Liddle (Lab)]

I am sorry to intervene. I was not here for the opening speech, which is very bad of me. As I understand it, at the moment, on the assumption that we are going to reach an agreement with the EU, the EU is being very co-operative in saying that British goods should be treated as EU goods for the purposes of our agreements with other countries. There is of course a problem if we have no deal, particularly if we have an acrimonious no deal. What would the situation be then? I cannot believe that the EU would exercise the degree of co-operation on this question that it is presently demonstrating the willingness to do.

[Baroness Fairhead]

That is exactly why the Government are clear that the preference is for a deal. That is what we are trying to achieve, because it is in the best interests of the UK.

Amendment 31 also aims to tie Ministers’ hands and compromise their ability to reach agreements that are in the best interests of the UK. As the Committee will be aware, it is neither beneficial nor appropriate for this House to fetter the Government’s capability in that regard. Therefore, as it is already an objective of the Government to seek continuity through cumulation or any other technical process, it is neither necessary nor appropriate to place a legal obligation of this kind in the Bill.

Brexit: EU Free Trade Agreements

Lord Liddle Excerpts

Thursday 24th January 2019 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Fairhead]

On any tariff rates, I repeat that this Government are clear in their aim to have a deal and an implementation period. There is of course a chance of no deal. There will come a time when we know the exact basis on which we are to leave. When that moment is clearer, the DIT will come forward with its day-one tariff schedules. I say again that we hope that that does not happen because we will have a deal. I can confirm that the Switzerland agreement has been initialled; it is expected to be signed very shortly. As my noble friend will know, the continuity agreement will wait until we have left the EU, because it is at that time that it becomes relevant.

[Lord Liddle (Lab)]

My Lords, does the Minister agree—I am not suggesting that it is her personal fault—that this represents a massive failure of policy on the part of the British Government? The Secretary of State, Mr Liam Fox, and Mr George Hollingbery gave assurances to the other place that the 40 agreements would be novated by the proposed leaving date. Hardly any of it has happened. Surely this is a demonstration of the failure of government policy, and an apology from the Government is required for letting us down on this aspect of Brexit, as on so many others.

[Baroness Fairhead]

My Lords, the Government’s policy remains to have a deal and an implementation period. If that is pursued, there is confidence that those agreements can be continued. That is in the interests of our businesses and our consumers. My urge would be that we find a way to a deal, so that that process can happen in a clear way. As for no deal, I have been clear in this House that timing is extraordinarily tight and our confidence would be much greater if there was an implementation period.

Trade Bill

Lord Liddle Excerpts

Committee: 2nd sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Wednesday 23rd January 2019 Lords Chamber

[Viscount Ridley (Con)]

My Lords, to be brief, as some others have put it, and with the greatest of respect, as the noble Lord, Lord Kerr, would put it, perhaps I might probe the Labour Party’s position on this. I used to hear members of the Labour Party, including many of those on the Front Bench in another place, make the argument that the problem with a customs union was that it hurt developing countries because of the external tariff. I would like to know what has happened to the argument and why we do not hear it from the Labour Party any more.

[Lord Liddle (Lab)]

My Lords, I will briefly express my support for the amendment. It is very important in the present political situation that we in the House of Lords demonstrate that, on a cross-party basis, there is some way forward out of the impasse we are in. For that reason alone, I support it.

The amendment obviously is not a complete solution to the Irish border problem. We would also have to have some arrangement of regulatory alignment. That, of course, is why the withdrawal agreement contains about 60 pages’ worth of EU rules that will apply in Northern Ireland but not in Great Britain, and why there would have to be some regulatory checks between Great Britain and Northern Ireland to make sure that rules on technical standards, health and safety, sanitation and that kind of thing would be adhered to. For there to be no border on the island of Ireland, that issue would have to be addressed, as well as the customs union. But the customs union is a large part, once you have made that step—and I do not think it is too far a step—of going on to deal with the regulatory questions.

On Labour’s position, it depends who you listen to. I am a great supporter of Keir Starmer, who talks about it in a very practical and common-sense way. But the truth is that sometimes people talk about a customs union as though it would be a relationship of equality between the United Kingdom and the EU 27 —which would, in effect, be trying to give the United Kingdom a veto over the Union’s autonomous trade policy. That will not work. It is not a runner. We could, as a big economy, negotiate very strong consultative arrangements, but I do not think that we would be granted a veto under any circumstances. Since we are in a position where we have to clarify these things in the next week—that is why have spoken frankly about this—it is important to acknowledge that that aspect is a non-starter.

So let us agree this amendment, refine it if we can on Report, and show that there is a spirit of co-operation in this House, which unfortunately there is not elsewhere.

[Lord Bates]

My Lords, this has been a fascinating debate. The noble Lord, Lord Stevenson, was very brief and succinct in introducing it. I will try to be pretty much the same in winding up. With the right reverend Prelate’s presence here and his questioning of a customs union, this is one of those debates where, after the past two years, I am not expecting to create many converts. Positions have been stated with great eloquence by my noble friends Lord Patten and Lord Lansley, and the noble Lords, Lord Kerr and Lord Hannay, but they are not ones that have differed, because of the veracity of the arguments and beliefs that they hold.

The noble Lord, Lord Liddle, came up with a great line which I scribbled down. I hope I have got it correct, because of course I do not have Hansard. He said that “on Labour’s position”—which of course my noble friend Lord Ridley asked about—“I suppose it depends who you are talking to”. I think I am right; I do not want to quote him incorrectly. It was an interesting point, because it would be fair to say that the Opposition’s position has differed between a customs union, a permanent customs union and a comprehensive customs union. It has oscillated between the crucial words “a” and “the”.

The noble Lord, Lord Purvis, applied a great deal of forensic scrutiny to this. His conclusion, and that of his party, is that they would be in favour of staying in the customs union, which makes it interesting that he has put his name to this amendment, which talks about “a” customs union. I cannot believe that there is now confusion even in the Liberal Democrats about what might be meant by this.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Bates]

That is the reason why we want to avoid the backstop.

[Lord Liddle]

Surely the best alternative way of benefiting from the growth outside the mature economies of western Europe—remember, this is catch-up growth; it is not a criticism of the European Union—is to be participants in the EU and its extensive trade deals with the emerging economies of the world. Why would we have a stronger negotiating position as 60 or 70 million than as an economy of 350 million or 400 million?

[Lord Bates]

Because 17.4 million people decided that they wanted to leave, and that is what the Government are committed to doing. I want to be careful not to be flippant about the subject we are dealing with; it is very serious, and the positions have been well argued. Nor do I want to be disrespectful to people for whom I have huge admiration, such as my noble friends Lord Patten and Lord Lansley, and the noble Lords, Lord Hannay and Lord Kerr, whose expertise I respect. But the position of Her Majesty’s Government is very clear. We have a deal. We should take advantage of that deal. A customs union would have all the disadvantages with few of the benefits. That is the reason we do not accept the amendment.