Economic Growth

Lord Tunnicliffe Excerpts

Thursday 23rd January 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Tunnicliffe (Lab)]

My Lords, I shall not speak about the economy, because I am not an economist, but I have always believed that the economy should be the servant of society. The trick is to allocate scarce resources to opportunities, with the objective of maximising social benefit. Even I recognise that excess demand for finite resources will just create inflation.

What are the opportunities that I am talking about? They are immense, starting with net zero. Then there is housing, with the target of 1.5 million houses; housing problems are at the centre of many of our social problems. There is domestic energy, heat pumps, insulation, transport, roads, rail, airports and health infrastructure to counter the crumbling infrastructure in the health service and other services, including water.

To achieve things, you need material, machinery and workers. Who are the workers that we need? They fall into two groups. The first group are roughly called “graduates”, who in general create intellectual property. The other group of workers, much more numerous, are the skilled manual workers who actually create the property. I believe from what I read that there is a crisis in the creation of a cohort of skilled manual workers. Where does it come from and what can be done about it?

We start with schools. For decades, we have said that success at school means that you go to university and get a degree. We do not recognise the value of the skilled manual worker; we have to change the culture so that they are held in similar regard to the workers in intellectual property. Further education has been chronically underfunded over several decades; it needs to be properly funded and integrated into the whole issue of creating this new cohort of skilled manual workers.

On industrial training, clearly the vehicle here is apprentices, but apprenticeships need to be much more finely tuned to what the real needs are and encouraged in any way we can way we can to improve the general training of workers. We are not just talking about initial training: we are talking about whole-life training, which is so powerful in a changing environment and for the dignity of workers.

Finally, the role of Her Majesty’s Government—sorry, that was old speak, I mean His Majesty’s Government—is to make things happen. Does the Minister agree with this analysis? Who in government owns the problem? All too often, problems are created by the structure of government. Who owns the problem of creating this skilled manual workforce and what are His Majesty’s Government going to do about it?