Institute for Apprenticeships and Technical Education (Transfer of Functions etc) Bill [Lords]

Adam Thompson Excerpts

2nd reading
Tuesday 25th February 2025 Commons Chamber

[Adam Thompson (Erewash) (Lab)]

I am pleased to speak in support of the Bill, unamended, which I believe is crucial to delivering growth and ensuring that we have a highly trained workforce that is fit for the future. As some in the Chamber will know, my job before coming to this place was teaching degree-level apprenticeships in electro-mechanical engineering. I saw at first hand the transformative power of apprenticeships in delivering high quality education while providing real world experience.

Like all apprenticeships, degree-level apprenticeships are a tripartite partnership between apprentice, university and employer—a model that has proved highly effective. Our employers frequently reported back to us that apprentices were better prepared for their professional roles than their counterparts with traditional degrees, and degree-level apprenticeship programmes have widened participation, attracting more students from deprived backgrounds, and more students with learning differences who may have struggled within the traditional university system.

As a Member of Parliament, I weave my background in education, advanced manufacturing, and apprenticeships into everything I do in this role. I recently visited WEBS Furniture Training, which trains apprentices in bespoke furniture manufacturing—a proper, old-school, artisan skill that they can carry with them and make a career from all their lives. Long Eaton and Ilkeston, the principal towns in my constituency, have a long and proud history of furniture manufacturing and lace making respectively. Both towns are what they are today firmly as products of the industrial revolution, and although the economy has changed since the Victorian era, bespoke furniture manufacturing, done by highly skilled, irreplaceable artisans, survives.

IKEA, robots, and giant factories in China cannot replicate the product of the honed, learned artistry that remains the backbone of our British manufacturing, and to survive now in this changing world, those are the kinds of skills that Britain must foster. Such skills are also an incredible means of spurring economic growth and resilience outside London and the greater south-east, and indeed outside the great cities of the north and midlands. Ilkeston and Long Eaton are post-industrial towns in the east midlands, and if we get this right, we can protect and enhance their world-beating lace making and furniture manufacturing industries long into the future.

If we are to build the 1.5 million homes that the Government have promised in the next five years, and hopefully many more long after that, and if we are to build the new towns, railway lines, reservoirs, prisons—all the things that this country has failed to invest in for so long—we will need the electricians, carpenters, joiners, builders, welders and plumbers that apprenticeship providers are training across our country.

I would like to present a case study about my good friend and colleague, Councillor Harry Atkinson. Harry was one of the many new young councillors elected in Erewash when Labour took control of the borough council in 2023. Next year, he will be Erewash’s youngest ever mayor, aged 25. Harry is also a highly skilled engineer. Leaving school at a time when about half of his cohort were going to university, Harry instead got an apprenticeship at Ratcliffe-on-Soar power station, which looms across the skyline of my constituency. Until last autumn, it was the last operational coal-fired power station in Britain. Harry has worked at Ratcliffe for nearly a decade. He has become so skilled that he has been promoted to managerial level and he is now a key trouble-shooter when things go wrong. While Ratcliffe is now in its decommissioning phase, Harry can be assured in his future because there is ample demand for the skills he learned in his apprenticeship, both locally and across the country.

Harry’s story represents the power of an apprenticeship —the conversion of hard work into real skills, an assured career and good pay. It is those kinds of jobs that we need to create for our young people. It is on us—this Government—to build a future where this kind of apprenticeship success story is the norm, not the exception, and where an apprenticeship holds every bit as much value as a degree, is every bit as desirable for children and parents, and is every bit as much a cornerstone of our growing economy.