Future of Work

Lord Sherbourne of Didsbury Excerpts

Thursday 12th October 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Sherbourne of Didsbury (Con)]

My Lords, it is a real pleasure to follow the maiden speech of my noble friend Lady Wyld. I congratulate her on a really excellent speech. It gave us insight into the path that has brought her to your Lordships’ House, her strong family background in north-east England, her involvement with business and her political experience at the heart of government. I know that she is involved with various organisations, not only in the business world but much more widely—for example, she is a trustee of the Urology Foundation, where she advises people on what are often very sensitive issues, and she has trained as a Samaritan. I know she will be making contributions in this Chamber on the issue of mental health, which my right honourable friend the Prime Minister has rightly made a high priority. We can look forward to her contributions. She will be a very valuable Member of your Lordships’ House and I welcome her to it.

Of all the speakers who came to our annual speech day at my grammar school way back in the 1960s, I can remember only one. I do not know who the person was, but he made one remark that I will always remember. He told us that, more important than all our qualifications, our GCEs and degrees, the one attribute that we would need more than anything else in the world that we were to enter was adaptability. That is why I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Knight of Weymouth, on introducing this debate, because it challenges us to look at the changes—technological, demographic and global—which are already transforming all our lives, and will do so even more in future.

Many of these developments will take us by surprise, but we can be certain of some things. There will be growing interdependence and integration between economies across the globe. In Britain, we will continue to face ever-keener competition from the great emerging economies. Our lives will become ever more digital, and automation and artificial intelligence will take over more and more. They will not only do jobs that people currently do; they will also create wholly new activities and opportunities not even dreamt of.

There will also be other certainties. People will be living longer, there will be a larger percentage of people in retirement and they will have to be supported by a workforce which is a smaller proportion of the population. There will be pressure to provide pensions and an ever-increasing need for care for the elderly. There will be amazing medical breakthroughs. That is wonderful, but it will require more resources—both financial and human—to go into healthcare.

Those are enormous challenges, but I am optimistic because although technology will take jobs from humans, it will also create jobs for humans. To give just a few examples, websites have to be designed and platforms need quality control. Google is said to have an army of 10,000 raters who monitor videos and test new services. Facebook has announced that it will almost double the number of its moderators. Of course, this will grow much more as Governments everywhere rightly demand ever more content moderation. According to the World Bank, more than 5 million people already offer to work remotely on online marketplaces. Queries received on websites can often be handled by algorithms, but not always. Questions with no simple answer have to be routed through humans and, of course, humans will still be needed to train algorithms.

Nevertheless, technology, artificial intelligence and automation will release thousands of people from their current jobs. This will be happening just when the ageing population and medical advances are creating greater and greater demand for better healthcare and social care. My main point this afternoon is this. The greatest challenge we face is how we train those people whose jobs are being taken over by technology for the health service and social services, where they will be increasingly desperately needed.