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

Lord Ravensdale Excerpts

Report stage
Wednesday 5th February 2025 Lords Chamber

Moved by

[Lord Ravensdale]

11: After Clause 8, insert the following new Clause—
“Report on green skillsSix months after the day on which this Act is passed, the Secretary of State must lay before Parliament a report assessing how they plan to carry out the functions transferred to them under this Act to support development of medium- and long-term green skills needed in order contribute to—(a) the achievement of the targets set under Part 1 of the Climate Change Act 2008,(b) the achievement of the targets set under Sections 1 to 3 of the Environment Act 2021, and(c) the adaptation to current or predicted impacts of climate change identified in the most recent report under section 56 of the Climate Change Act 2008.”

[Lord Ravensdale (CB)]

My Lords, I declare my interest as a chief engineer for AtkinsRéalis and as a director of Peers for the Planet.

My two amendments in this group address the two issues I raised in Committee. I will first cover the need for a duty on Skills England regarding the critical area of green skills, which is covered by Amendment 11. Given the scale of the skills needed to address the challenge of turning the UK into a clean energy superpower, and the challenging targets that we have—the national strategic goals of climate mitigation and adaptation—many Peers have been pressing for a long time to put in place a national strategy for responding to these skills needs. We had some welcome progress with the Skills and Post-16 Education Act 2022, when the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, agreed an amendment with the Government for a climate duty on the development of local skills improvement plans.

What was missing was that overarching strategy. We all welcomed the formation of Skills England to begin plugging those gaps. I am very grateful to the Minister and her team for their collaborative approach in response to this amendment, which we raised in Committee, to include the delivery of our climate and nature targets within Skills England’s remit. Having this in the framework document for Skills England, given the constraints of the legislation, will ensure that this national strategic goal is woven into Skills England’s approach and that the good work already going on at local level through the LSIPs can be knitted together. We have had some really good feedback on the LSIPs and how they are working, but the missing piece is that integration. What the Government are doing with the framework document will help to address that. It will take things to that next step of integration, so I am very grateful to the Minister.

Amendment 12 is based on an amendment tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, in Committee. I recall the noble Lord saying that we all support devolution and its goals but that we start to create joins that did not exist previously and that we have somehow to find a way of joining those bits back together, whether with a regional or sectoral approach.

The key point of the amendment is to ensure that Skills England delivers for areas without a devolution deal. This is based on my experience in the Midlands, which I set out in detail in Committee and will not repeat here. I thank the Minister and her team for committing to include within the framework document that Skills England will address those regional skills gaps. This is important for ensuring that Skills England delivers for all areas across the UK. I look forward to further detail on how that will be implemented. As the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, said, the policy is the easy bit; the implementation is the challenge.

On a related point, this highlights the importance of a regional view for skills to ensure that there is that coherent delivery of skills for key priorities. The regions are the right level to do that. In my industry, the nuclear industry, we could in the Midlands consider, for example, just what Derby needs for submarine nuclear reactors and small modular reactors. We could consider separately what West Burton needs for STEP fusion and what Birmingham needs for nuclear components. However, we can do so much more with a regionally integrated skills picture to avoid that duplication and to ensure that we share that knowledge and expertise on skills development. That is why we have set up Midlands Nuclear and the Midlands hub for nuclear skills to take that regional view.

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[Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Ravensdale, for his amendments and for the conversations we have had about the reasoning behind them, which I accept. We had a meeting with the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, on this issue as well. He is right to draw attention to these two very important issues, namely the crucial need to boost the availability of green skills and the need to ensure that high-quality training is available to—and designed in line with the needs of—all parts of the country.

As set out in the Invest 2035 Green Paper, published ahead of the forthcoming industrial strategy, delivering long-term sustainable growth is inextricably linked to our mission to make Britain a clean energy superpower. It is critical that the skills system is set up in the right way to deliver on this mission. I will return to that in a moment. Meanwhile, our English Devolution White Paper makes clear the Government’s commitment to spread growth and opportunity to all parts of the country and sets out the route to delivering much-needed change. It will not be possible to deliver on these priorities without building the evidence on the scale and nature of green skills needs in the economy and ensuring that there is a comprehensive suite of training that aligns with the identified needs and is available for people to access up and down the country. Therefore, Skills England must have a central role in driving the change that is needed on both issues the noble Lord, Lord Ravensdale, has highlighted. I am very pleased to have the opportunity to set out in more detail the work that Skills England will do—and indeed has already begun—in this space, and hope that this will be sufficient to persuade the noble Lord not to press his amendments.

Amendment 12 would create a duty on the Secretary of State to lay before Parliament, within six months of the passing of the Act, a report which assesses the co-ordination of local skills improvement plans, assesses the impact of the functions transferred to the Secretary of State on those parts of the country without a devolution deal and determines the scope and level of investment of the growth and skills offer in meeting national, regional and local priorities.

As set out in Skills England’s first report, working together with partners on the ground to ensure that regional and national skills needs are met is a central function of Skills England. While in shadow form, Skills England is already working closely with a range of key organisations at local and regional level to ensure that we are laying the foundations for joined-up decision-making and information sharing, which will ensure that we develop the highly skilled workforce that our economy needs in all parts of the country.

Skills England is collaborating with mayoral strategic authorities, as well as local government in areas which do not yet have devolution arrangements, to shape the delivery of skills provision. It is also working with a wide range of regional organisations, such as employer representative bodies, to help them contribute to the construction of skills systems that reflect and feed into both local and national priorities. As noble Lords have mentioned, local skills improvement plans support this objective by providing an ongoing mechanism through which local employers, strategic authorities, providers and other stakeholders come together to identify and resolve skills needs and issues. LSIPs will be overseen by Skills England, helping to ensure that all parties play their part and take action where needed, such as increased support through dedicated relationship managers.

I take the point made by both the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, and the noble Lord, Lord Ravensdale, that there is a complexity in the relationship between the national priority setting and action, and the regional and local environment. We have already worked on this and I commit to ensure that we work further. Skills England is clear about the way in which it will create co-ordination between those levels, particularly with respect to those areas which do not have some of the devolved arrangements that, for example, the mayoral areas have.

Our reformed growth and skills offer will enable employers to fund training that meets priority skills needs identified by Skills England, in addition to apprenticeships, recognising the importance that high-quality work-based learning has in our skills system. The new offer will be aligned with the industrial strategy, creating routes into good, skilled jobs in growing industries, such as construction, digital and green skills.

It is by drawing on evidence from, and working with partners across, the system that Skills England is developing—and will continue to develop and publish—authoritative analyses of national and local skills needs. In its first report, Driving Growth and Widening Opportunities, published last September, it provides an assessment of the key skills challenges that limit growth and opportunity, and an initial assessment of the skills needs in the economy. Building on that, Skills England will publish a further report in early 2025, providing more detailed sector-specific skills assessments and analysis of the agreed set of priority sectors defined by the industrial strategy.

Given the centrality of the local and regional dimension to Skills England’s work, the public reporting and governance arrangements I have described previously—those being a published framework document, the annual report and corporate plan—would include an assessment of its impact on delivery against these aims, including in respect of LSIPs, areas not yet covered by devolution deals and the growth and skills offer. It is for this reason that I hope that the noble Lord will feel that his amendment would duplicate the existing reporting requirements that I have outlined and is therefore unnecessary in light of those requirements.

Amendment 11 would place a duty on the Secretary of State to report on how, in their use of functions transferred to them, they are supporting the development of green skills. Extensive work to identify and address current and future green skills needs is being prioritised under this Government to ensure that the UK workforce is prepared to deliver the clean energy superpower mission. Reporting on green skills has already started, ahead of Skills England being fully established. Skills England published an initial assessment in its first report in September of last year, which included a description of the scale of the challenge and some of the key skills needs of the green economy, as well as those specific to clean energy. Skills England will build on this in its second report, which will provide sector-specific skills assessment of priority sectors, including the eight growth-driving sectors identified in the Government’s industrial strategy and those pivotal to delivering the Government’s missions, notably net zero and clean energy.

In recognition of the issues raised by the noble Lord, Lord Ravensdale, and acknowledging the importance of green skills and meeting necessary climate targets, I will ensure that the Skills England framework document includes specific reference to Skills England’s role in developing green skills. The noble Baroness, Lady Barran, has already noted that we have included that in the framework document—albeit not quite in the terminology that the noble Baroness would have wanted to see. In respect of Skills England’s local and regional work, I would also expect information on its work on green skills to be included in the annual report and corporate plan that Skills England will be required to publish, given its vital importance. The Department for Education is already required by the Environment Act 2021 to report on progress on green skills through the annual carbon budgets delivery audit.

As such, I hope the existing requirements and the commitments I have made here in respect of green skills will be sufficient to deliver on the aims of the amendments tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Ravensdale, which I do support and have been pleased to engage with him on. For the reasons I have outlined, I hope that the noble Lord will be assured of the Government’s commitment to these vital issues and that he will therefore see fit to withdraw his amendment.

[Lord Ravensdale (CB)]

My Lords, I listened very carefully to what the Minister had to say, and I am very pleased with what she said. There was a lot of reassurance on areas without a devolution deal, particularly within the reporting requirements for Skills England and how it will engage with regional and local bodies, which answered the original intent of my amendment.

We have reached an excellent compromise on green skills as well. Having the detail in the framework document —the way it has been mapped out, particularly in referencing our targets—is a really important step forward to properly integrate it with the delivery of green skills and our climate and environment targets.

I thank the Minister again for her approach and collaboration in the meetings she has undertaken with us to get to this position. I beg leave to withdraw my amendment.

Amendment 11 withdrawn.

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

Lord Ravensdale Excerpts

Committee stage
Tuesday 26th November 2024 Grand Committee

[Lord Ravensdale (CB)]

My Lords, I declare my interests as set out in the register, including as a chief engineer working for AtkinsRéalis and as a director of Peers for the Planet. I shall speak to my Amendment 36A; I thank the noble Lord, Lord Knight, for his earlier support. I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Watson: I am a bit bemused that I was unable to mention Skills England in my amendments, but we are where we are.

The skills landscape in the UK is undergoing seismic change and gearing up for both the industries of the future and the energy transition. In my engineering business, we are recruiting as fast as we can to deliver the transition in clean energy that is currently working its way through the economy. Renewables, carbon capture, nuclear, hydrogen and grid expansion are all seeing bottlenecks in terms of the skills availability in the UK to deliver the Government’s aspirations in this area. Of course, net zero is much broader than just the energy system. It is interesting to note, perhaps, the success that we are having in reskilling engineers from other industries. For example, we have recruited from Dyson many engineers who have fallen victim to the recent job cuts there and reskilled them to work on clean energy projects. They have gone from designing vacuum cleaners to designing nuclear reactors—no problem.

In 2021, I worked on my first Bill, which became the Skills and Post-16 Education Act 2022. Following the excellent work of the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, and others, the Government agreed to include a climate duty in local skills improvement plans; this was a great step forward. Although that climate duty is very welcome for the development of LSIPs, what we have seen to date is quite a piecemeal approach in that area. I set out some of the issues with LSIPs at Second Reading, including the need for a greater, systems-level join-up of these plans in order to avoid duplication and ensure consistency.

At the heart of this is the fact that we are currently without a national picture of how the UK can prepare workforces to close the skills gaps related to our net-zero targets; to seize new net-zero opportunities; and, crucially, to address the challenges posed by transitioning from high-carbon sector roles, for example in the oil and gas industry. That last point is crucial in maintaining public support for this agenda.

Some really good work has been done at a sector level, which I think we can work from. I highlight the excellent work done by the Nuclear Skills Taskforce, which resulted in the National Nuclear Strategic Plan for Skills. Crucially, it recognised that a tailored approach to the UK regions was necessary; as a result, we now have a number of new regional skills hubs for nuclear that co-ordinate approaches across regions, all tied together through an overarching strategy. We can learn from that. In the Midlands, we are planning to expand this regional hub approach more broadly across clean energy. One of our offers to the Government includes working to set up regional skills hubs and to provide the skilled workforce that will be so important if we are to maximise the opportunity from the energy transition. But we do need that national plan.

It reminds me in some ways of the commonality here with how we are implementing clean energy. We have local area energy plans rolling up to regional plans and the national plan, which is the Strategic Spatial Energy Plan. In the same way, we need that roll-up through the skills system, as also brought out by the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, in his excellent Amendment 31.

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[Lord Storey (LD)]

My Lords, I added my name to the important amendment in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Aberdare. I was fascinated to hear that he actually read the Labour manifesto; that is very impressive. I also support my noble friend Lord Addington’s amendment.

It is quite important that the noble Lord, Lord Ravensdale, and the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, mentioned mayoral combined authorities—the noble Lord called them pan-regional partnerships, which I had not heard before—and local skills improvement partnerships. Can the Minister tell us how those will feed into the department or how she will consult them?

[Lord Ravensdale (CB)]

My Lords, my amendment follows on nicely from what the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, said earlier. He put it very well: devolution is really good and something that we can all support, but it creates joins that we then have to knit back together. We have to consider carefully how we do that knitting together, which is what my Amendment 36B is aimed at.

I shamelessly copied Amendment 27 in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, which I support, in order to do this. However, I made one slight tweak to include the regional perspective, which I mentioned in our debate on the previous group, so that pan-regional partnerships are consulted; that refers to partnerships such as the Midlands engine and the northern powerhouse.

At Second Reading, I set out my concern that local areas that are not part of a combined authority or have other devolution deals could lose out under the proposals that the Government are putting forward. I listened carefully to the Minister’s response at Second Reading, which allayed some of my concerns, but I would like to test this issue in some additional detail.

Taking the Midlands, where I live—I live in Derby—as an example, following welcome devolution in recent years, we are now blessed with two really good combined authorities. We have the West Midlands Combined Authority and, as of recently, the East Midlands Combined County Authority. Although these combined authorities cover areas of the west and east Midlands, they account for less than half the population in the Midlands region, which is around 11 million people.

As I said at the start, this highlights something of a problem with the devolution agenda. The combined authorities have been successful at working with governments to unlock additional funding for their areas, but this has meant that those living outside combined authorities have sometimes been left behind. As an example, for many years, the East Midlands has lagged behind the West Midlands on many indicators, for example when we look at transport spend per head or public investment per head of population. This will be partly remedied by the new East Midlands Combined County Authority, but many areas of the Midlands are not covered. I am concerned that the same pattern will follow with skills, so the question is: how will Skills England ensure that the approximately 6 million people in the Midlands who do not live in a combined authority area are considered?

The Minister has stated that Skills England will consult regional bodies but it would be helpful for her to clarify how that governance structure will operate; that is the subject of my amendment. Pan-regional partnerships such as the Midlands engine are set up to consider these regional issues. They would be well placed to pull together those plans and to co-ordinate combined authorities and other areas of local government in order to ensure that regional skills needs are met; they could also act as a focal point for regional skills needs in working with Skills England.

In this way, the Government can unlock the benefits of an integrated regional skills approach, flowing up from local areas to the regions and to the national view that Skills England will have, and ensure that no areas of the regions are left behind or inadequately represented. The Government could also benefit from the powerful data capabilities of pan-regional partnerships such as the Midlands Engine Observatory. This would align with the approach I set out in the previous group on regional skills hubs and the work already ongoing there. The pan-regional partnerships are helping to facilitate those regional skills efforts. It would also be a means of achieving the join-up of local skills improvement plans that the noble Lord, Lord Aberdare, referred to on the previous group.

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.

Universities: Nuclear Energy Sector Skills

Lord Ravensdale Excerpts

Thursday 7th December 2023 Lords Chamber

[Viscount Hanworth (Lab)]

My Lords—

[Lord Ravensdale (CB)]

My Lords—

[The Lord Privy Seal (Lord True) (Con)]

There is plenty of time for everybody, if we show the normal courtesies and go round the Chamber.

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[Baroness Barran (Con)]

The Government feel that we have made major commitments in this area. We committed up to £385 million to an advanced nuclear fund to provide funding for small modular reactor design and to progress plans for demonstration examples by the early 2030s at the latest.

[Lord Ravensdale (CB)]

My Lords, I declare my interests in the register. The Midlands region faces particular challenges in this area, with the ramp-up in AUKUS in the near term, which the Minister referred to, and future programmes such as the STEP fusion reactor at West Burton. How do the Government plan to support nuclear skills programmes in the Midlands, and will the Minister agree to meet with me and wider stakeholders to discuss how we can work together in this area?

Skills and Post-16 Education Bill [HL]

Lord Ravensdale Excerpts

Report stage
Tuesday 12th October 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bird (CB)]

I want to support the amendment from the noble Baroness, Lady Neville-Rolfe, but probably from a slightly different angle. People who end up doing apprenticeships and going into vocational work often had problems at earlier stages in their education. I am speaking from my own experience. We have to recognise that 49% of employers say that they do not quite believe in the curriculum that children follow before they go into apprenticeships, or even to university. We always seem to be behind—we run our education system preparing children for jobs that often disappear before they come out of school. I was one of those people: I was trained in a very careful way to be a builder’s labourer when I left school at 15, but unfortunately, they had brought in all this gear, so I had to do things other than dig holes and lay concrete. I am being a bit facetious, but the point is that we have to make sure that, for the period before people enter an apprenticeship and before they wonder whether they are going to go to university, we look at reinventing that kind of education.

The biggest ask among most employers is more creativity, because they know that, with 65% of the jobs not yet invented when children are at school, we need to find a way to up our game. We have a skills shortage now which has led to the fact that there are 1.4 million jobs. If we did not have that—if we had made the adjustments many years ago—we would not have the problem of the law of unintended consequences, which means that we cannot even get gas or petrol from our local garage.

I believe that, if we are to go anywhere, we have to reinvent the whole way in which children are taught creatively. I declare an interest, in that I put my children through the Steiner system: on the first day of school you are taught about nature, on the second day you are taught about making things, and you go on and on. They put enormous emphasis on chess and maths and various other things, and the children who come out at the end are the children people want in the industries of tomorrow.

[Lord Ravensdale (CB)]

My Lords, I declare an interest as an engineer and project director for Atkins, and as a director of Peers for the Planet. I am delighted to support the amendment in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Neville-Rolfe, to which I have added my name. I apologise to noble Lords for not speaking at earlier stages of the Bill, but I have followed its progress closely and am really pleased to be able to speak on this amendment today. I welcome the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, to her post in the DfE. It is great to see her in her place.

Amendment 8 seeks to ensure that some critical skills development for long-term national skills needs are taken into account in local skills improvement plans.

On digital skills and innovation, these skills areas are critical to the recovery of the economy following the pandemic and to the future, yet we are seeing a crisis in digital skills, with the number of young people taking IT at GCSE falling by around 40% since 2015, and high rates of digital exclusion; 20% of children in one class in a secondary school local to me do not have access to the internet, which is a shocking statistic. Digital skills cut across all areas of the economy and will be part of the key to addressing the flatline in total factor productivity growth across the economy that we have seen since 2008.

I will give noble Lords a simple example. In my consultancy business a few years back we were commissioned to do a project to undertake a large data transfer activity. On reviewing the task, one of our young engineers proposed using robotic process automation techniques to complete the task instead of the original manual approach, whereby an advanced computer script undertook the task in place of engineers. This allowed it to be completed in a third of the time and cost, saving hundreds of thousands of pounds. That is productivity growth in action. In addition to improving productivity, such a process frees people from mundane and repetitive tasks and enables them to take on more value-added work; I liken the technology to the modern equivalent of machine automation, saving people from the drudgery of Adam Smith’s pin factory. Robotic process automation is already leading to data and finance sectors repatriating work that had previously been offshored, and to significant productivity gains, with work being undertaken by teams of software robots overseen by humans.

Time and again I have seen the ability of advanced software skills to automate tasks and radically improve the productivity of teams and projects, yet in my business and in businesses across the UK we are struggling to attract these skills. I am currently building a software team to design the control system software for a new nuclear reactor, and our job adverts for software engineers go largely unanswered. It is possible that this reflects my limited aptitude for advertising, but, in all seriousness, we must ensure that digital skills are prioritised to enable our businesses to grow, innovate, compete, create the jobs of the future and create the high-wage, high-productivity economy that we all want.

Our economy has long seen a shortfall in engineering skills. EngineeringUK estimates an annual shortfall of around 59,000 people in meeting an annual demand for 124,000 core engineering roles requiring level 3-plus skills. As our economy undergoes one of the biggest transformations in its history, engineering will become more important than ever. For example, it is estimated that between nine and 12 gigawatts of new generating capacity must be installed every year between now and 2050 to meet our net zero goals. New gigafactories will need to be constructed and immense infrastructure programmes completed to decarbonise heat and industry. All this will need to be accomplished by engineers. Again, in my consultancy business we are struggling to grow to meet demand from clients because there are simply not enough qualified engineers to go around. This is just to meet current demand. As engineering is a key enabler for the future economy, it too must be prioritised in LSIP developments.

I second the comments of the noble Baroness, Lady Neville-Rolfe, on the built environment and will not expand on them here, but I congratulate the Government on bringing forward amendments on alignment with climate and net zero goals in response to the work led by my noble friend Lady Hayman. Our amendment complements these by focusing on the key enablers for our future economy. I note the synergies with the green skills strategy amendment proposed by my noble friend.

Finally, I have a question for the Minister. I had an excellent skills review meeting with stakeholders from the Midlands Engine yesterday—I declare my interest as co-chair of the Midlands Engine All-Party Parliamentary Group. Given the importance of SMEs to the region and indeed nationally, there was some concern that their voices would not be heard, and that employer representative groups would be dominated by large corporates. This follows on from amendments raised by the noble Baroness, Lady Neville-Rolfe, and the noble Lord, Lord Patel, among others in Committee. Can the Minister provide some reassurance that those important voices will be heard in LSIP development?

[Lord Adonis (Lab)]

My Lords, it is very hard to disagree with anything that has been said in the last hour. Obviously, we all want to see that skills are promoted. We all agree that we need more green skills. We all agree with Amendment 8 in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Neville-Rolfe, that we want to see more digital innovation, engineering and built environment skills. She has a catch-all of

“any other fields the Secretary of State deems relevant.”

So, in case the noble Baroness feels that she does not have enough powers in the department, she can have almost anything she likes under paragraph (e). Who would want to disagree with Amendment 9 in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett of Manor Castle, that we should include the food system and ecomanagement systems? We all agree with all those things.

However, in essence, this is all fiddling while Rome burns, because the Government do not require any of these powers to promote skills. They have all the powers they require to promote skills. They do not need any additional funding powers. They have funding powers, and they directly control all the funding levers. They appoint all the people to the various quangos. The whole of Clause 1 on these local skills improvement plans appears to me to be a substitute for actual action on improving skills.

Obviously, we will have a lot of generation of plans now. Consultants are salivating; I know because I spoke to one last week who told me that he is already starting to put bids in writing. The people who will actually do these skills improvement plans are not all the big employers and those others we have paid tribute to. They will be consultants, who will be paid by those people, who want to start bidding for the money to start producing all these plans. Now that they might have an even longer list of things they have to produce—particularly with the amendment in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Neville-Rolfe—my goodness, the fees these consultants will charge will go through the roof as they start to produce them.

It is motherhood and apple pie. No one is going to disagree with any of these things. The fact is that they will not make any difference: the Government could do it all already. They have had years to do it. They do not require any of these powers. They do not require local skills improvement plans for employers to be brought together locally. Indeed, as we ascertained in Committee, the actual groups of employers that are going to be brought together do not exist at the moment. In the White Paper, which I recommend that noble Lords read, there was a great tribute to chambers of commerce. They might be able to bring these together—except that the box on page 15 of the White Paper says:

“Case study: German Chambers of Commerce”,


because, for the most part, chambers of commerce do not exist in this country due to chronic failure of policy over the last 150 years.

This is all fine; we can carry on like this and make all these legal provisions and probably nothing much will change. But we face a real crisis in the real world. The noble Lord, Lord Bird, referred to apprenticeships. The route by which most young people who do not go to university get on a career ladder to get well-paid jobs in this country is, or should be, apprenticeships. While we are talking about local skills improvement plans and new employers’ bodies that do not currently exist and which are going to produce all these plans, in the real world there is a deepening apprenticeship crisis at the moment. I looked up the figures before coming into the House. The latest figures published by the ONS in May this year show a 19% drop—I repeat, a 19% drop—in the number of apprenticeship starts in the first two quarters of 2020-21 compared with a year before. The drop in intermediate-level apprenticeships, which is by and large those people who most noble Lords would think of as apprentices—that is, school leavers who are getting on a work and training route which will get them an apprenticeship—dropped by even more. The apprentices mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Bird, are now few and far between.

By the way, none of these local skills improvement plans will make much difference to this, because apprenticeships are largely created directly by employers, whereas the local skills improvement plans we are talking about are guidance to public providers, predominantly FE colleges, on what sorts of courses they should provide. But the number of actual apprenticeships—which are the things that, for the most part, will get young people jobs—is declining. We went through the reason why they are declining earlier, but we have not yet had any satisfactory account from the Government about it. It is because of the chronic misdesign and failure of the apprenticeship levy. The apprenticeship levy, which was dressed up by George Osborne as a levy on all employers to require them to train more apprentices, has led to a systematic decline in the number of apprentices, for two reasons.