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.