Queen’s Speech

Lord Macdonald of Tradeston Excerpts

Tuesday 10th June 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Macdonald of Tradeston (Lab)]

My Lords, it is my privilege to congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Bamford, on such an attractive and authoritative maiden speech. His mastery of business is evident in the outstanding global success of his family business, JCB, which I think is now the world’s third largest construction equipment manufacturer. His expert report, commissioned by the Prime Minister in 2012, argued persuasively for improvements in the Government’s engagement with business. One recommendation was for a better system of training and education for young people in technical fields, which I shall advocate today, although not so eloquently as the noble Lord. Like him, I was an engineering apprentice, so I particularly look forward to him championing the cause of manufacturing in future debates in your Lordships’ House.

The Queen’s Speech stated that the Government would increase the total number of apprenticeship places to 2 million by the end of this Parliament. Provisional figures show that under the coalition there has already been a total of 1.7 million apprenticeship starts in the past four years. However, with the annual number of starts now running at half a million a year, getting from 1.7 million to the target of 2 million in the next year should not be too challenging.

That said, I welcome the cross-party consensus we now have on the need to improve vocational training and revive apprenticeships. From the 1970s, under successive Governments, traditional craft apprenticeships collapsed. When New Labour took office in 1997, the number of apprenticeship starts had fallen to only 65,000 a year. Although priority was given to boosting student numbers, the Labour Government also worked to improve vocational training including apprenticeships. By the time Labour left office in 2010, new starts had risen from 65,000 to 280,000 a year. However, the unsatisfied demand for vocational training was highlighted in a recent debate in your Lordships’ House. My noble friend Lord Layard said that in 2012-13 some 800,000 young people between 16 and 18 registered as applicants for apprenticeships and only one in seven was successful. Surely priority should be given to putting school-leavers into jobs, especially into apprenticeships.

The concern is that the coalition has for the past four years markedly increased apprenticeships but for the over-25s, in part perhaps to boost annual totals. The Local Government Association worries that more than 80% of the recent increases in apprenticeships has been in sectors generally associated with low skills while starts in key engineering sectors remain low. Indeed, the Institution of Mechanical Engineers said in response to the gracious Speech that hitting the 2 million target was not enough when the UK needs to double its intake of engineering apprentices to keep pace with demand.

There is real concern, too, about skills in the construction sector. Recently, a group of cross-party parliamentarians published some alarming figures in their report, No More Lost Generations: Creating Construction Jobs for Young People. The report said that this £100 billion industry would create 180,000 extra jobs and need to hire 400,000 building workers to replace those retiring over the next four years. By contrast, the number of completed apprenticeships in construction last year was 7,000. That was half the number of the year before. Can the Minister tell us if construction training will get the urgent attention it clearly needs in the last year of the coalition Government?

There is also concern about the estimated 30% of apprentices who are not paid the minimum wage to which they are entitled. The welcome news is the legislation promised in the gracious Speech to impose higher penalties on employers who fail to pay staff the minimum wage.

Since 90% of employers do not train any apprentices, popularising apprenticeships with employers is surely our biggest challenge. The Labour Party has an independent skills task force whose reports reinforce the view that employer groups must take more control over how public funding for apprenticeships is deployed and how skills standards are set. Another key taskforce recommendation is to increase further the number of higher apprenticeships with progression to degree-level status—a policy that also deserves to be embraced in cross-party consensus.

The fact that almost 50% of young people are now in higher education generally is to the credit of successive UK Governments. A challenge for schools, though, is, through better career advice and curricular reform, to make the study of science, technology, engineering and mathematics—the STEM subjects—more attractive to more pupils. However, it should also be emphasised that the UK benefits greatly from the more popular subjects in the arts and humanities, which attract the talent driving the growth of our world-class creative industries. These are expanding at an encouraging rate and offer exciting career prospects. Despite that, the number of apprenticeships in arts and culture jobs seems strangely stunted. If I read the figures correctly, only 1,000 of that total of 500,000 apprenticeship starts per year are in the arts and culture subset of the creative industries. Does the Minister agree that employers in the creative sectors should, as a priority, create more apprenticeships, so that those from less privileged backgrounds can better compete with well connected graduates and those able to work on unpaid internships while also opening up entry to a range of craft roles?

Finally, it is surely regrettable that half the UK’s large companies do not offer apprenticeships. We can no doubt change that if we sustain the cross-party consensus and support for vocational training. We should also look again at the proposal that the Government use the leverage of their billions of pounds spent in public procurement of goods and services to boost apprenticeship opportunities by requiring companies bidding for larger contracts to offer apprenticeships. Regulators could also be asked to assess what scope there is to add apprenticeship training to the contractual obligations of their large companies. Does the Minister agree that that approach deserves further consideration as parties prepare their manifestos for next year’s general election?

Christians in the Middle East

Lord Macdonald of Tradeston Excerpts

Friday 9th December 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Macdonald of Tradeston]

My Lords, I thank the most reverend Primate the Archbishop of Canterbury for this timely debate and for his clear and insightful review of the situation of Christians in the Middle East.

As we have heard today, the potential for greater violence against Christian communities is feared by millions, and the Arab spring, which raised such high hopes, might now remove some of the protection that was previously imposed by dictatorial state edicts.

The violence against Coptic Christians in Egypt goes back decades, as we have heard. Given past hostilities, the recent killings in Cairo must confirm their worst fears following the recent election results. Even in more tolerant Tunisia, elections brought to power an Islamist party. However, in Tunisia we may also glimpse the possibility of a new political path away from past intolerance. The president of the victorious al-Nahda Party, Rached Ghannouchi, says that lessons have been learnt from North Africa’s harsh past. He recalls the experience of a generation ago in Algeria, where the electoral victory of an Islamist party with an extremist agenda was brutally crushed by the Algerian military and other vested interests. Mr Ghannouchi assures the world that he wishes to govern with a wide coalition of Tunisian political parties.

It is interesting, too, that the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt also claims to have become more accommodating to other parties with differing views. The Egyptian-born cleric, Yusuf al-Qaradawi, preaches a now moderated Sunni message weekly on Al-Jazeera from his base in the pro-western state of Qatar.

These Islamists blossoming in the Arab spring say that they now prefer the model of reform and Islamist government successfully deployed in modernising Turkey to any repeat of the bloody Algerian adventure or the risk of a return to violent repression by the army in Egypt. In Turkey, while moving to join the EU and embracing the market economy, the Freedom and Justice Party has also defanged the military and dispelled the threat of a coup against its electoral legitimacy.

Of course, the optimism about the Arab spring may turn out to be misplaced. In fact, realists predicted the rise of long-repressed Islamist parties in possible alliance with authoritarians in the military. After the first election, they warned, the Islamist victors would ensure that it was the last fair election—witness Iran. That might still be the case, as I think the noble Lord, Lord Sacks, suggested.

Nevertheless, the most viable option is to attempt to turn the rhetoric of reform into reality and to direct it towards endorsing the values and the institutions of the international community. As a former chairman of the All-Party Parliamentary Humanist Group, I readily accept that interfaith dialogue, as advocated by many of your Lordships today, is a more productive route than any alternative that I could propose. Noble Lords will surely have the support of non-believers in their efforts to encourage tolerance and dialogue, and most assuredly in every effort to protect Christians and other groups, including converts—apostates from Islam, who often live with even greater risk of persecution. In return, I hope that faith groups will be equally strong in their defence of non-believers. The democratic West has propped up a range of unlikely and often unsavoury allies for strategic reasons, and as a by-product offered protection from sectarian violence to vulnerable groups. If that strategy is now in question, we might try a route of real democracy and accept that we will not always welcome the electoral outcome. I agree with my noble friend Lord Parekh that democracy can be its own corrective in exposing and discrediting the policies of extremists.

The most reverend Primate noted that today is Global Anti-Corruption Day. I note that tomorrow is International Human Rights Day. Our basic document for the democratic direction of nascent Governments in the Middle East must surely be the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The great moral document, which emerged from the horrors of the Second World War, states that:

“Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion”.

There are many other explicit and inspiring articles in that great declaration that have been carried into the European Convention on Human Rights, such as the statement:

“Freedom to manifest one's religion or belief shall be subject only to such limitations as are prescribed by law and are necessary in a democratic society … for the protection of public order, health or morals, or for the protection of the rights and freedoms of others”.

There is scope here for constructive interfaith dialogue and the consolidation of democratic secular experience.

The European Convention on Human Rights, incorporated into UK law in our Human Rights Act 1998, has also, through case law, moved to recognise a category of “religion or belief”. Humanists and faith groups might also find common cause in explaining that an ideal secular state is simply one that protects the rights of all its citizens to hold their own beliefs and religious practices.

I hope, too, that the most reverend Primate the Archbishop of Canterbury will amplify the analysis made in his 2006 lecture, Secularism, Faith and Freedom, to promote procedural secularism. He spoke of a situation in which,

“religious convictions are granted a public hearing in debate; not necessarily one in which they are privileged or regarded as beyond criticism, but one in which they are attended to as representing the considered moral foundation of the choices and priorities of citizens”.

That would be a very pertinent contribution to the debate on the constitutional challenges that attend the Arab spring. I also hope that it will be propagated by the UK Government and that secularism can be rescued from the misunderstandings that are so widespread still in some faith communities.