Baroness Neville-Rolfe
Main Page: Baroness Neville-Rolfe (Conservative - Life peer)Technology and People: Deloitte Report
Baroness Neville-Rolfe Excerpts
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Business, Innovation and Skills and Department for Culture, Media and Sport (Baroness Neville-Rolfe) (Con)
My Lords, I, too, thank my noble friend Lord Borwick for securing this debate and Deloitte for its report. We have had a wide-ranging discussion on some of the opportunities and, rightly, some of the challenges that advancing technology presents. I enjoyed the regal veto to the patenting of an Elizabethan stocking machine. I will check the next time I visit my colleagues at the National Archives to see if I can answer his question. I was also fascinated by the cheerfully dressed robo-receptionist in Japan—very James Bond. But can they provide the eye contact which makes for good customer service? On that point, I was struck by the comments of the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Derby about how changes in community nursing might cut across face-to-face pastoral care. I also thought he was right to emphasise the role that business can play in passing on the benefits of technology to staff and developing responsible supply chains.
This has been an extremely interesting, thoughtful and unusually long-term analysis by noble Lords right across the House, and I am grateful to my noble friend Lord Borwick for inspiring it. Technology has advanced at a tremendous pace. I suspect that most of us, when we think about it, possibly consider that everything in life around us is speeding up. That may be only an illusion, perhaps one of the depressing effects of increasing age, but it seems not just to be an effect of age. It seems inevitable that technological change will continue to astound us. Whether the effects of that change will be close to the suggestions in the Deloitte report is another matter. If we could look into the future clearly, we could all retire and bookies would be bankrupt. That appears not to be the case now, nor likely to be the case any time soon. That said, the report makes a number of suggestions and guesses that are sensible.
Great advances in technology are nothing new; such advances have been a feature of our economy for centuries, from the spinning jenny—a particular favourite—to railways, the internal combustion engine, electricity and the world wide web. These advances in technology—many of them British, I am proud to say—have brought about huge changes to our society and the world, and the net balance has been overwhelmingly positive.
Of course, there is a serious point here. Given the likelihood of radical change, what are we in the UK doing to prepare ourselves for it, especially in the area of training and education? I believe that how this will play out goes well beyond the scope and powers of any Government, and I share much of my noble friend Lord Patten’s scepticism about BIS overexpanding to try to anticipate all the changes that we have, or to pick winners, as some Governments have sought to do in the past. But government must do its bit as best it can, and I turn now to what we have done and intend to do in the light of our best appreciation of the future. These are naturally reflections of the present position and may need to be adapted over time.
The noble Lord, Lord Mendelsohn, and my noble friend Lady Rock were right to highlight our success in this country in R&D, and I particularly liked the example of Harwell. I refer, too, to Innovate UK. Since 2007, it has invested around £1.8 billion in innovation, matched by the private sector, which has returned between £11.5 billion and £13.1 billion to the economy. Innovate UK has also supported innovation in nearly 8,000 organisations, creating around 55,000 new jobs. The Government are committed to the Catapult network, and have prioritised funding support for it in the recent spending review. That means leveraging our brilliant R&D communities, which have been mentioned, by commercialising new and emerging technologies, bridging the gap and turning new ideas into innovative products and services. Life is changing with 3D printing, the internet of things, genomics and artificial intelligence, including chatbots, as my noble friend Lord Patten said.
The noble Lord, Lord Giddens, rightly spoke of the great wave of digital change, the sheer speed of the latest revolution, the widespread implications and the need to track the change. I am a huge fan of evidence-based policy-making, so I particularly like that last point.
The noble Lord, Lord Rees of Ludlow, was right to add other developments such as machine learning, typified by that extraordinary Chinese game of Go, sensors in the medical sector and driverless cars, which all correctly form part of our debate.
The Government are also building four new university enterprise zones in Bradford, Bristol, Liverpool and Nottingham, where universities and business work together to increase local growth and innovation. The centres are expected to create nearly 2,300 jobs in high-tech small businesses by the 2020s.
Of course, it is important that we are responsive to the changes innovation can bring. In the labour market, our employment law framework is deemed by the OECD to be one of the most flexible, allowing employers and workers to adapt to new models of work and progress. We have introduced the national living wage, which will benefit millions of low-paid workers by 2020 and help them to share in technology and growth. Universal credit is beginning to revolutionise the welfare system. Our flexible labour market has proved that it is resilient to shocks, and at 74% our employment rate is at its highest since comparable levels began.
Technology has played a part in making it easier to work flexibly and for a wider range of people to participate in the labour market—for example, those with young children. The noble Lord, Lord Addington, mentioned the benefit that technology has brought to him as a dyslexic. We are very grateful for the contribution he made to policy on learning difficulties with his amendments to the Children and Families Bill. Indeed, it is partly due to the benefits of technology, which I found very valuable as a working mother, that the employment rate of single mothers has increased so much over recent years and that the employment rate of disabled people has significantly increased over the past two years, with almost 300,000 more disabled people in work.
It is critical that future members of the workforce are equipped with the skills they will need in the future and those which employers will want. The noble Lord, Lord Fox, rightly talked about the importance of the education system. I was interested to hear his ideas for increasing the study and raising the status of STEM in schools. Of course, schools are now legally required to provide independent careers advice, and there are a number of initiatives to encourage STEM such as Tomorrow’s Engineers Week and Your Life to encourage the study of maths. I was lucky enough to study maths, but I went to a convent, and I never did any physics from day one to the day I left. That would not happen now, I am sure. Now 40% of our STEM ambassadors are female.
I am especially grateful to my noble friend Lord Holmes for his kind prediction that I will not be replaced by a machine. My noble friend Lord Fairfax of Cameron will be interested to hear that I trained as a company secretary. The Deloitte report states that the number of company secretaries has halved, but I have been saved by your Lordships from being made entirely redundant.
Gaining the skills we need begins at school. My noble friend Lady Rock rightly pointed out that the English curriculum now includes coding. That will help us to deal with her prediction that 60% of the jobs that people will be filling do not currently exist.
Beyond school, we are introducing ground-breaking reforms to technical education, which we hope will set England’s post-16 education system on a par with the best in the world. The apprenticeship levy will fund a step change in apprenticeship numbers and quality, delivering on the commitment that there will be 3 million additional apprenticeship starts by 2020. Our revolutionary reforms to the apprenticeship system will result in workers with the high-level skills that employers need. In addition, the creation of a new network of specialist training providers, including national colleges and institutes of technology, will help to address technical skills gaps and shortages in industries and sectors that are critical to the economy.
I should respond to the question from the noble Lord, Lord Haskel, about the Bean review of economic statistics, measuring Uber and so on. We endorse the recommendations of the independent review, and we have announced that we will invest more than £10 million in a new ONS data science hub and a centre for excellence in economic measurement. It is correct that our statistics may be missing aspects of the internet revolution.
I agree with my noble friend Lord Borwick about the benefits of technological advancement and innovation. I am optimistic that the UK’s economy and the labour market have the potential to embrace these changes and benefit from them. We are a resilient and talented nation. The world will continue to evolve, but this Government are continuing to back innovation and we are taking the action needed to equip people with the skills that they need for an uncertain future. I thank noble Lords and my noble friend Lord Borwick for this debate.