Public Services: Workforce (Public Services Committee Report)

Baroness Brinton Excerpts

Friday 16th December 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Brinton (LD) [V]]

My Lords, I declare my interest as a vice-president of the Local Government Association. It is always a pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Pitkeathley, and I too will be focusing on skills and education in workforce planning. I congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Armstrong of Hill Top, and the Public Services Committee for the excellent report we are debating today.

Given that we are living in a perma-crisis, thinking about the long term appears to be a luxury, but this report demonstrates that not thinking strategically and long term adds to the crisis we face as a country in planning and managing the public sector workforce, at the same time as we face major demographic changes that will mean that public services have to change. As the health and social care spokeswoman for the Lib Dems over the past three years and, indeed, for a year in 2013-4, it feels to me as though the current NHS workforce crisis has been growing, first slowly, and now rapidly, over recent decades, long before Covid-19 arrived in early 2020. There are not enough doctors, not enough nurses, not enough GPs or pharmacists, and Government after Government have said that they would increase numbers but have increasingly relied on qualified professionals from abroad, because those same Governments—of all colours—would not invest in training, education and workforce planning for these key roles.

So this report rightly resists the short term, because thinking about only the current crisis and not understanding how the lack of planning has significantly worsened the current position remains a problem. Having effective long-term and medium-term workforce planning that links all elements of the pipeline—from schools, through to apprenticeships and further and higher education—and understanding how changes in delivering services must necessarily affect planning for the workforce on a rolling cycle, is a key benefit.

One such issue, mentioned briefly by the noble Baroness, Lady Armstrong, is the training of the teaching workforce, especially in STEM subjects. Every conclusion and recommendation in the report could have been written about this issue alone. Over the past decade, the overall number of qualified teachers in state-funded schools has not kept pace with increasing pupil numbers. In particular, there is a problem with attracting enough trainee teachers to start in the secondary sector, and it is growing fast. Worse, there are not and have not been enough trainees coming forward to teach STEM subjects, especially physics. This was a problem 15 years ago, and too frequently results in stoical teachers who are not qualified in maths and physics having to step up to the role.

This is a real problem. The report points out the growth of technology in the delivery of public services and asks that workforce planning and service delivery ensure that new ways of working are prepared for carefully. But the problem is already evident in our schools system, and local authorities no longer have the role they had when I was chair of education and libraries in Cambridgeshire in the 1990s, when we were able to work with our local authority schools and parents to encourage and support STEM teachers and STEM subjects. That was especially important in Cambridge as it became a technology city. All that is now fragmented.

We need to change our secondary education system to ensure that all pupils and students continue with maths and science subjects until they leave school. Your Lordships’ House has had many debates on this subject. However, that aspiration remains unhelpful if there are not enough teachers to teach those subjects. Under our current public service delivery structures, who thinks about the pipeline for teacher training, let alone ensuring that in the UK in the mid-21st century, trainees in the public services arrive from their schools, universities and apprenticeships with the breadth of education they need for a technological future in which the skills of language and communication will also remain paramount? I am not sure that it is evident, certainly not when funding for public services is so stretched. Will the Minister say not just how the Government will help achieve the aspirations of this report, but how they will ensure that the all the stakeholders in the pipeline are involved and understand that they have a key role in making it happen?

I also commend the report for recommending the involvement of service users with lived experience, as well as the need to involve voluntary sector bodies and urging a more flexible process. The Minister knows that your Lordships’ House has discussed the voluntary sector and social enterprises a great deal recently in the Procurement Bill, but the report goes a step further and asks for a key shift in how the public sector works with the voluntary sector. On these Benches, we have always strongly advocated for vocational and professional education, and I echo the report’s concerns about the Government’s removal of the apprenticeship target, and that in seeking to search for and combat these challenges they are doing the opposite.

As the founding chair of the Cambridgeshire Learning and Skills Council in 1998, I particularly welcome paragraph 29 in the summary of conclusions, which says:

“To boost retention and support staff to progress into more senior roles, the Government should work with regulators to develop straightforward and practicable ways to recognise, assess, and record prior learning and experience using a competency approach.”


That, along with creative thinking outside some of the rigid qualification tramlines of the past, is beginning to change progression for those in care and nursing, but the noble Baroness, Lady Pitkeathley, is right that there is a long way to go.

Thirty years ago, we still had a barrier between state enrolled nurses and state registered nurses. The former would now be referred to as care nurses, usually identified solely by entry qualification, while SRNs were those who continued the more academic education with a higher qualification. The barrier between them was insurmountable but, thankfully, that is changing. Now the pathways from apprenticeships into care can lead not just to being a registered nurse but beyond degree level to nurse practitioners working in specialised areas and able to prescribe medication—unimagined 15 years ago. While admirable, though, that will not work without effective workforce planning. As the report says, demographic changes and the differing treatments that patients receive compared to even five years ago mean that awareness is important and recruitment into health pathways and on into work must be planned years ahead.

To conclude, we know there is some good progress in some areas, but overall the real problem persists. Until national and local government can create the capacity to think strategically and long-term to implement the recommendations, they will remain aspirations. I hope the Government will be able to confirm that they can deliver the framework for that step change.