Autumn Budget 2024

Lord Monks Excerpts

Monday 11th November 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Monks (Lab)]

My Lords, in my contribution to this debate, a debate so well led by my noble friend Lord Livermore, I will focus on growth and vocational skills.

We have to start by honestly acknowledging that the UK performs a lot worse on growth and skills than other comparable countries and similar democracies and that, as a consequence, our productivity, as others have mentioned, is disappointing. There is nothing new there—successive Governments have tried to remedy that; ever since I started work, they have been trying to remedy it and it is very difficult—but now we are about to embark on another quest for the holy grail of high and sustainable growth. Historically we have tried a national plan; we have tried deregulation, low tax and privatisation. We have welcomed globalisation and high immigration, and now we have left the European Union and its single market to try to go it alone. None of those initiatives have been game changers and some, such as Brexit, have been positively harmful, but we are still stuck with the problem that we have identified, even since the 19th century, of a record that is unimpressive in many ways.

I believe that one key reason for that is the narrow focus of much of British business on short-term shareholder value. It produces too many anaemic companies that are too feeble to grow our market share of world trade and lead the way in particular product areas. How are the Government going to encourage longer-termism in Britain’s boardrooms and try to get British companies on a better footing than they are at the moment?

One necessary component is a highly skilled and motivated workforce, with a culture of excellence and an emphasis on lifelong learning that shows that people can change and be flexible. That opens the door to intelligent and constructive relations between management, workers and trade unions.

We also need urgent action immediately to boost colleges and vocational education. The Budget proposes a £300 million cash injection, which is welcome and will, I hope, boost FE, too often squeezed as it is between schools and universities.

I wish Skills England well. This whole area is littered with failed institutions, with most industrial training boards, the Manpower Services Commission and learning and skills councils among the most prominent. Can Skills England be a game-changer and make the crucial differences? To me, frankly, it looks a bit of a medium-term project, and I am looking for more urgent action. As has been said, the capital investment plans being developed will need a lot of skilled workers, but they are not around at the moment. Could we have a national crusade on skills, with crash programmes to tackle likely vital areas of skills shortages? We would not hesitate to do that in wartime conditions. We are in peacetime now, but we have some big problems that need a huge national effort to overcome.

Lastly, on a different tack, I ask the Government to re-establish the TUC’s Union Learning Fund. This brought into the world of skills training and education people who were mostly very poorly educated and unconfident about taking training courses. It set them on a skills improvement trajectory that would benefit them and the community. Successive Education Secretaries—Conservative ones included—supported it, but Gavin Williamson, foolishly, did not. Can it please be reinstated?