Britain’s Industrial Base

Lord Young of Norwood Green Excerpts

Tuesday 9th October 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Young of Norwood Green]

My Lords, I, too, congratulate my noble friend Lord Adonis on creating the opportunity for this debate. Given the complexity of the subject, it is a short period to try to deal with it. I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Marland, on his appointment. I do not envy him trying to sum up this debate given the varying strands and the different advice that he has been given. Given the time available, I am going to focus on only one or two issues.

Skills are a key part of our industrial base and I want to draw attention to the importance of STEM subjects. My noble friend Lord Haskel mentioned the quality of teaching in engineering, maths and physics. My noble friend Lord Adonis was one of the promoters of Teach First. In trying to convince young people that engineering is an area worth entering, we need to focus on the quality of teaching.

There was lots of talk about infrastructure. I want to concentrate on our broadband network, investing in it and making sure that investment delivers and delivers on time, given the importance of broadband investment in R & D and in all our industries. My noble friend Lord Adonis talked about the poor quality of the mobile network. Why is it taking us so long to introduce 4G? By the time we get round to introducing it, 5G, which is on the horizon, will already be with us.

Given my interest in skills and apprenticeship, I want also to focus on apprenticeships. A variety of advice is coming to us on apprenticeships. I am not sure that I completely agree with my noble friend Lord Bhattacharyya on how we should fund them, but their importance should not be underestimated. My noble friend Lord Adonis told us of his experience of companies saying to him, “We were looking for 86 apprentices out of 1,500 and we could not get them”. That comes back to the quality of teaching and ensuring that our best young people understand that it is worth going into engineering. That is fundamentally important. My noble friend Lord Bhattacharyya reminded us that the number of applications for apprenticeships vastly exceeds those available. Demand exceeds supply enormously. My noble friend gave his example and the example that I normally give is British Telecom. It has some 300 apprenticeships and it gets something like 25,000 applications.

The number of companies offering apprenticeships is still pitifully small—only a third of the FTSE 100 companies. Somewhere between 4% and 8% of companies are actually offering apprenticeships. They are a good deal, so how do we encourage the creation of apprenticeships? I hope the noble Lord will address in his reply why the Government are not demonstrating by example and by their own leadership. When they offer government contracts, they should ensure that apprenticeships and training are a key part of those contracts. We did that in the previous Government, and it is interesting that the noble Lord, Lord Hennessy, in his contribution referred to the Olympics—I cannot remember the wonderful quote from Abraham Lincoln. It was not by chance that we got nearly 400 apprentices out of the Olympics; we got them because there was a demand on the companies. Similarly with Crossrail, we ensured that some 400 apprentices would emerge from that. I cannot for the life of me understand why the Government do not understand the importance of demonstrating through their own contracts the creation of apprenticeships. It is an area that the Government have to tackle.

There is another way the Government could encourage apprenticeships. If they want more SMEs to participate in apprenticeships, one of the key ways is through more group training associations, the hubs that encourage SMEs to recognise that if some of the administrative and training burden is concentrated centrally, it becomes much more attractive to those companies to participate in apprenticeships.

I am conscious of the clock, so I will wind up my speech. I think it was my noble friend Lord Giddens who gave us the global perspective, if you like. I did not know whether to feel cheered or gloomy at the end of it, although he gave us some sage advice about the great challenge of trying to create net jobs. I hope that when the Minister gives his reply, he will focus on how we are going to create more apprenticeships.