Craft Industry: Support

Lord Lingfield Excerpts

Thursday 12th June 2025 Grand Committee

[Lord Lingfield (Con)]

My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Freyberg. I remind the Committee of my registered interest as chairman of the Chartered Institution for Further Education.

I will speak about an important and brand-new initiative in heritage crafts: the Wren international centre of excellence at St Paul’s Cathedral. It has been created out of a space at the level of the cathedral’s crypt, which was previously used for storage, and obviously named after Sir Christopher Wren, who is buried nearby. The new centre is a workshop and training space for heritage craft skills. Rebecca Thompson, the director of property at St Paul’s, says that it is hoped to be

“a leadership network to address the national shortage of heritage skills”.

Its first apprenticeships will be shortly advertised—in stone-masonry and carpentry—and those appointed will begin practical work in the summer, with concomitant college courses in September.

From 2005, I came into close contact with the heritage skills required at St Paul’s for, as Knight Principal of the Imperial Society of Knights Bachelor, I had the job of supervising the creation of a new chapel there for the knights from an area that had hitherto been used as a depository for office equipment. I was able to prepare the preliminary drawings with the Surveyor of the Fabric and to oversee the necessary work, which obliged me to raise £1 million. It required specialist carpenters, turners, masons, welders, enamellers, silversmiths and bronze workers, and was opened by the late Queen Elizabeth and the late Duke of Edinburgh in 2008.

Innovations of the kind now in train at St Paul’s are very seriously needed. As we have heard, the number of people entering the heritage skills sector is in decline, and in many cathedrals such as St Paul’s, there are teams of conservators and crafts professionals with an ageing demographic, with retirement on the horizon and with the unwelcome likelihood that they will not be replaced.

We of course sit today in a world heritage site, and it will face the huge task of restoration and renewal in the coming few years. This will require a large number of trained heritage crafts professionals. Attractive jobs here will inevitably entice talented people away from other sites, such as cathedrals, exacerbating the shortages of skills that already exist.

In our several debates on restoration and renewal, I have recommended to your Lordships that we have a duty to construct, when R&R details become clearer, a Palace of Westminster scheme to showcase apprenticeship. It should be a subject of contract, between the House authorities and the firms fulfilling the necessary heritage craft tasks here, that they will guarantee to employ and teach apprentices. It is vital that restoration and renewal is not just a consumer of crafts skills but an active source of training for future careers in these important heritage areas.

I have recommended that all apprentices working here, or on associated projects off the site, should be registered with the Westminster apprenticeship scheme and, at the successful completion of their training, receive a special certificate. I have already persuaded the Speaker and the Lord Speaker that they should present them when the occasion arises. We want these young people to be proud of being part of the history of the Palace of Westminster and to come to understand the craft vision of Sir Charles Barry and of Augustus Welby Pugin that underpins it. I commend that initiative to your Lordships.