Institute for Apprenticeships and Technical Education (Transfer of Functions etc) Bill [HL]

Lord Ravensdale Excerpts

2nd reading
Tuesday 22nd October 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Ravensdale (CB)]

My Lords, I declare my interests as a chief engineer working for AtkinsRéalis, the chair of Midlands Nuclear and president of the Sustainable Energy Association.

I deal with skills challenges on the ground every day. I work in business and my industry, the nuclear industry, is undergoing a significant period of growth. We currently have around 83,000 people in the sector but, to meet growing demand and replace people leaving, we need to fill around 40,000 new jobs by 2030. My business in Derby has some really specialised technical skills that are difficult to find on the market, which is acting as a brake on our ability to grow our business and contribute to the Government’s economic growth goals, as well as the national goals of clean power and the defence of the realm. For example, software engineers, electrical, control and instrumentation engineers, and process engineers are very difficult to find. The Minister will be aware of the Nuclear Skills Taskforce and the resulting nuclear strategic plan for skills, which are a great first step in meeting these opportunities.

In that vein, I welcome the intent of the Bill in taking a more integrated and joined-up approach to skills across the country, particularly in better considering regional needs. I will concentrate my remarks on how Skills England will work from a regional perspective.

First, local skills improvement plans—LSIPs—were set up as part of the previous Act, to which noble Lords have referred. I was grateful to the Minister for speaking at a recent Cross-Bench meeting where I raised this issue. Overall, LSIPs have been a welcome development in helping to set out plans to meet local skills needs and provide better join-up between local businesses and skills providers, but we have sometimes found limited join-up nationally. This can result in them being fairly generic or overlapping, in some cases. Can the Minister provide more detail on how Skills England will help set the strategic direction for LSIPs and other potential reforms to these plans?

Secondly, on regional partnerships, in the Midlands where I live, we are now blessed with two combined authorities. We have the East Midlands Combined County Authority and the West Midlands Combined Authority, but these cover only a relatively small part of the region. How will Skills England operate regionally and deliver for those areas not covered by combined authorities?

For me, part of the answer is in the regional partnerships—for example, the Midlands Engine and the northern powerhouse. I am currently chairing an energy security task force for the Midlands Engine that is all about how the region can seize the opportunity of the energy transition. One of our offers to the Government is to work right across the region to collaborate, test and scale a skills-hub approach to address the technical gap in the region’s clean energy and manufacturing sectors, intervening where the markets currently cannot. In fact, following a meeting earlier this year with the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, we are setting up a regional nuclear skills hub, which will start to reap some of those benefits. Such hubs could provide specialised training and school-level engagement, foster innovation, support workforce transition, and encourage collaboration between academia, industry and local communities, leveraging the region’s wealth of universities and colleges. I would be grateful if the Minister could say how Skills England might work at a broader regional level to ensure that the overall skills picture and demand is being considered.

Finally, following on from the remarks of the noble Lord, Lord Hampton, on better linking up schools’ under 16 education with regional opportunities, there is a real opportunity here for the Government, and that is something else that we in the Midlands region are considering carefully. There are lots of successful opportunities, such as the Science Summer School of the noble Lord, Lord Mawson, and Professor Brian Cox. In many regions across the UK, it is doing a great job of linking up schools with broader opportunities. As the noble Lord, Lord Beamish, said in his excellent maiden speech, this all feeds in to raising aspiration in many areas across the country and getting young people excited and enthused about contributing to the national goals that the Government are pushing. I very much look forward to working with the Minister and her team on this important Bill.