Employment: Automation

Baroness Kramer Excerpts

Monday 1st April 2019 Lords Chamber

[Lord Henley]

My noble friend is an optimist, as the House will be aware. He is a rational optimist—if I may give a little plug for his book—but he is quite right to mention that there have always been worries that, with each new wave of automation, jobs will be lost. As my noble friend has said, what has happened is that, with each new wave of automation, we have seen jobs go but it is the boring, repetitive jobs that have disappeared to be replaced by machines. It might be that, as he points out, some of the boring, repetitive jobs that solicitors do, such as conveyancing, can be more easily done by machine.

[Baroness Kramer (LD)]

My Lords, only 19% of the digital technology workforce is female, as are only 15% of computing graduates and only 17% of fintech founders. In an age where automation will become dominant, is it not time that the Government abandoned relying on these sorts of piecemeal, scattered or small-scale initiatives to increase diversity and launched a holistic, well-resourced and high-profile strategy, along the lines of the anti-smoking campaign, to challenge everything from unconscious bias to the lack of training and role models, and to de-risk change generally?

[Lord Henley]

My Lords, I do not quite take the almost semi-Stalinist approach that the noble Baroness is putting forward. What I am saying is that society will change as a result of these things but the Government must also recognise that it is going to change. That is what the industrial strategy is all about, and we will go along with that.