Professional Qualifications Bill [HL]

Lord Sikka Excerpts

Committee stage
Wednesday 9th June 2021 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Noakes (Con)]

My Lords, I put my name down in this group in order to speak to Amendments 19 and 29, but I shall say a few words first on Amendments 52 to 55. Normally, I do not support Report amendments, which are a slightly lazy way of trying to open up a debate on wider issues, but in this case I think they have a point.

The Government’s impact assessment is, to use a tactful term, pretty light. It certainly does not analyse very much impact, probably because the Government do not have a clear idea of what they are going to do with the powers in the Bill. If that is not clear from the Bill itself, it is certainly clear from the report of the Delegated Powers and Regulatory Reform Committee. Poor impact statements are a widespread problem and we will not solve that for this Bill, but it is incumbent on the Government to be transparent about the impact of a Bill once it becomes law.

I shall therefore be listening carefully to what the Minister says, because it may well be that some or all of Amendments 52 to 55 will need to be considered again on Report. Alternatively, as my noble friend Lord Lansley suggested, we could legislate for post-legislative scrutiny; after five years might be an appropriate time for a report. However, it is very important that we monitor the Bill’s impact.

If the noble Baroness, Lady Hayter, has one defining characteristic, it is her determination to get the consumer interest felt, and she frequently finds all kinds of surprising ways to do that in Bills, but I want to explain why in this instance she is wrong to try to get the Bill amended with her Amendments 19 and 29. I was particularly struck by a briefing from the British Dental Association that commented that this Bill appears to focus on services, consumers and trade. Those are inappropriate concepts to describe the healthcare professions, which are certainly one of the major reasons given for this Bill being enacted and are cited as the professions likely to be covered by the regulations under Clause 1.

Those terms may well be appropriate for other professions which qualify and oversee professionals who trade their services, though I am not sure that “consumers” is always the right description for those other professions. For example, I do not really know who the consumer is in relation to regulated auditors, who are covered by this Bill via the Financial Reporting Council. The healthcare professions are focused on safety rather than on what consumers want or need from the profession, and we should never lose sight of that.

I do not think that either the consultation requirement in Amendment 19 or the board membership requirement in Amendment 29 fit well within this Bill, given the focus on the healthcare professions that is likely to follow once the Bill becomes law. I completely get that regulated professions and their regulators must not be focused on their own narrow interests but bear the public interest in mind. But that is usually achieved through regulators being independent of the professionals they regulate, and they often have independent members comprising some or the majority of their boards. If they are not on their boards, they are certainly well entrenched in their disciplinary processes. That aspect, the independent characteristic of the regulators, is what we should focus on in this instance, rather than the consumer interests.

[Lord Sikka (Lab) [V]]

My Lords, it is a great pleasure to speak in this debate, especially after the noble Baroness, Lady Noakes. I support Amendment 55 in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett of Manor Castle.

This amendment takes a broader view about the nature of skills shortages and human consequences from the recognition of professional qualifications. There are many reasons for this Bill, and one is the failure of the United Kingdom to produce skilled labour, and the relative absence of any coherent government strategy to produce the desired skilled labour force. The problems have been well documented. For example, in 2000 a report published by the National Skills Task Force said that there were

“external skill shortages, that is, recruitment difficulties due to an excess of demand over supply of required skills in the external labour market”.

Examples included

“highly-paid occupations requiring specific technical qualifications such as engineers and technologists and health and related occupations … and craft and technician vacancies in the engineering industry”.

It also referred to internal skills shortages—that is,

“skill deficiencies among existing employees”.

Similar skills gaps were identified in the 2019 report by the Industrial Strategy Council, which said that about 21 million workers—two-thirds of the workforce—might

“lack the basic digital skills”

that employers will need in 2030.

Some businesses have responded to skills shortages by renting talent from external partners—for example, through outsourcing partnerships. Of course, that creates its own logistical and organisational problems. Nevertheless, in the absence of a coherent strategy, neither the Government, the industry nor universities have been able to address the perennial problem of skills shortages.

Finding appropriate PhD students, as the noble Lord, Lord Patel, mentioned, is also highly problematical. It is simply too costly for many individuals to undertake a PhD in the UK. In supervising PhD students for nearly 30 years, I can only recall about one or two indigenous British students who came to do a doctorate in accounting, business or finance. It is so rare.

At the moment, the Government and industry are not even connecting the dots. The spate of hiring and rehiring workers on inferior pay and working conditions will not address skills shortages and will have a negative effect on attracting new local talent to crucial industries. After all, if the wages and working conditions are poorer, why would somebody want to go into that industry?

The Government’s strategy so far has been to enrol and recruit foreign workers to fill the gaps. That is especially evident in the National Health Service. Brexit has added new dimensions because it has alienated many EU workers residing in the UK. Their departure and the unwillingness of many other EU citizens to work in the UK have deepened and widened the skills shortages.

The Government are now looking to recognise foreign qualifications to address the local skills shortages. The aim, as always, is to poach skilled persons from abroad. The traffic will predominantly be one way from developing countries to the UK. I doubt that many Brits will actually want to go and work in countries such as Ghana, Zimbabwe or Nigeria, where the wages may be lower and the working conditions may not be comparable.

This ability to poach workers from other places will inevitably dilute the pressure on the UK to develop its own institutional structures to address the skills shortages. That development is highly necessary, and we need a government strategy. Therefore, it is absolutely right that Parliament must monitor the impact of this Bill on the management of strategies for addressing skills shortages, as has been extremely well articulated by the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett of Manor Castle.

To be clear, I am not against mutual recognition of qualifications, as this increases opportunities for individuals, but I am very concerned about the negative consequences for developing countries. They spend millions of pounds to educate and train engineers, doctors, surgeons and other skilled persons, but will never see the full benefit of their social investment. It can take more than a decade to train a skilled doctor or surgeon and, at the end, having developed those individuals, the developing countries will be unable to receive the benefits. There are also other consequences. To put it another way, if the UK started to see its highly educated citizens leave on a scale already observed in many developing countries, it would find itself with a smaller and less educated workforce. Such changes would coincide with a more rapidly ageing population due to the fact that emigrants tend to be younger adults.

For a long time, the UK has taken the cream of the skills from developing countries with absolutely no compensation. This brain drain retards the development of local economies and social infrastructure. It results in a huge transfer of wealth from poorer countries to the UK, while they suffer from a lack of sufficiently skilled personnel in both the public and private sectors. With a loss of skilled labour, poorer countries cannot offer universal healthcare to their citizens. That is just one example. The only appropriate redress is a bilaterally managed scheme of direct reimbursement of the value lost to each of the countries affected by migration of skilled labour. I sincerely hope that the Minister will give such an undertaking and, in due course, bring legislation to provide further details and make the compensation to developing countries a reality.