Economy: Manufacturing

Lord Young of Graffham Excerpts

Thursday 3rd July 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Young of Graffham (Con)]

My Lords, I congratulate the noble Baroness on introducing this debate. First, unequivocally, manufacturing is important, but I also believe that it has to be put in context. Let me explain. Three hundred years ago, 97% of jobs were agricultural; 250 years ago, along came the Industrial Revolution; and by this time in the last century we were a manufacturing nation. There is no doubt that that was the way in which you created wealth. But life moves on.

The noble Lord, Lord Monks, paid tribute, with which I rightly agree, to the role that the trade unions played after 2008 and 2009 but I notice he did not refer to the role that they played in the 1960s and 1970s. Nevertheless, by the time I came into this House, I was instrumental in introducing three Japanese car companies into this country to rescue a proud industry that had been broken down by years of turmoil and conflict. If you look at us today with not only Nissan, Honda and Toyota but also with Jaguar Land Rover, you realise that we make more cars than we ever made before. If you go into a car factory, you do not see many people because if you want an efficient manufacturing business it has to be done by robots which work 24/7, never take a tea break or ask for a raise, although they have to be funded differently. However, robots do not run by themselves.

I turn now to some work on education which I have been doing for the previous 10 months. An educated and talented workforce is key to any industry we have in this country. I introduced the youth training scheme 32 years ago this month, which is when we ran the pilots for the first of the schemes. I went down to a small manufacturing company in the West Country, and I went to the quality control department. I saw a young lad, who was in one of the pilot groups, calculating deviancies and plotting on charts exactly what was going through the quality control system. I said to him, “You must have been very good at maths”. “Oh no, sir”, he said—that was the way they spoke in the West Country—“I didn’t get anything at school”. The supervisor said to me, “As soon as he saw the relevance of what he was doing, he learnt”.

Over the next three years I went round the country, week in, week out, and I saw this time and again. I came to the conclusion that in reality the fourth R is relevance. In those days, after 10 years of compulsory education, up to 30% of young people left the school system illiterate, innumerate or sometimes both. I come back all these decades later and go round looking at the school system again, and I see that conditions have not changed that much. The Prime Minister asked me to look at this, and I have been working on small firms for him since the beginning of the coalition. I went to him over a year ago and said, “Whatever we do, we have to look at the way we educate our people.” This has nothing whatever to do with the curriculum—we have no complaints about that, except that I sometimes think that it could be more relevant. It has to do with motivation.

Education has to encourage young people to see the relevance of what they are doing, and encourage them to work. That is why I hope that the report which I published last week will come into effect. I believe it will have a transformational effect on the state of education in this country. It includes such things as an enterprise adviser for every head teacher. Here I should satisfy the noble Lord, Lord Monks, that I have the agreement of both the head teachers’ unions, and we work closely together. The enterprise adviser will be responsible for bringing speakers into the schools system, to talk to pupils not when they are 17—as I have done and, I suspect, many of your Lordships have done—but when they are 12 and 13. They would then be able to appreciate the relevance of what they are about to be taught. It would be best for pupils to be spoken to not by the great successful captains of industry, but by someone who left their school a few years ago, has a little business round the corner and has a nice car—that is a key element. He or she can say to them, “This is the reason I succeeded”.

It is not only enterprise. In my book, yes, enterprise makes entrepreneurs, but it is also about seeing the glass as full, and being positive. I am convinced that this can be taught. Enterprise is also about bringing in advisers who can talk about STEM subjects to encourage young people to get the basic skills to go into manufacturing, because today manufacturing does not consist of people with screwdrivers. It consists of people who can operate computer programmes and people who can look at the way that robots work.

I have not spoken in your Lordships’ House for many years. I see that my time is nearly up, and I have no intention of getting into trouble. I am grateful to your Lordships.