Skills and Post-16 Education Bill [HL]

Baroness Stroud Excerpts

2nd reading
Tuesday 15th June 2021 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Stroud (Con) [V]]

My Lords, I speak today to add my support for this Bill and to congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Black, on her maiden speech. The United Kingdom stands at a reset moment. It has delivered on the vote for Brexit, is forging a new trading relationship with our European allies and is charting a course towards global Britain. While the UK was among the hardest hit by Covid-19, it is now finding a way out of the global pandemic, emerging as a world leader in the design, development and distribution of effective vaccines. But if we are to make the most of this reset moment, we will need to unlock the talent, prosperity and potential of our regions, communities and people. In order to do this, there needs to be a real focus on developing the skills required not only for a 21st-century skills revolution but to create the economic powerhouse that will drive the United Kingdom forward. We will need every element of British talent.

In many ways, the UK is well positioned to do just this. We are one of the most prosperous countries in the world, with an open and vibrant economy. Our national institutions are robust and our people are among the most educated in the world. But there are also clear challenges. While levels of prosperity in the UK remain much higher than other nations and increased further during the first half of the 2010s, in more recent years this prosperity has been stagnating. One of the key drivers of this stagnation has been declining enterprise conditions, including skills shortages and barriers to doing business. England, for example, has three times more low-skilled people among those aged 16 to 19 than the best-performing countries such as Finland, Japan, Korea and the Netherlands. In many ways, this was less visible while we had unrestricted immigration. But now that we can feel the impact of more controlled migration, we can see the need to really focus on upskilling our own people. This is a good thing, and one that we should hugely welcome.

So why is this Bill so welcome, and why has our existing approach to skills development simply been insufficient? For the past 20 years, the UK poverty rate has shimmied at around 20% of the population. In the Labour years, just about every income transfer that could be thrown at this challenge was thrown, and the level still shimmied at or around 20%. In the coalition days, just about every employment intervention was thrown at this challenge, and the level still shimmied at or around 20%. If we have learnt anything in the past 20 years, it is that we cannot solve poverty through income transfer alone, or through supporting people into low-paid work alone.

The poverty data shows that if you are on the national living wage, it takes all adults in a household working full-time to lift a family out of poverty. Even then, 10% of such households are still in poverty. These families cannot work any more hours. They need to increase the value of each hour they work. To do this requires increased skills.

The way to ensure that families who are doing everything right are out of poverty is to invest in their skill level and enable them to be able to earn more for each hour they work. This Bill is therefore hugely important as part of an anti-poverty strategy, but to actually level up requires us to develop those with the lowest levels of skills at a faster rate even than those who are already skilled. This will require opportunity, so there is one area where I would specifically like to probe a little on this matter.

The current welfare system is not really designed as a support mechanism for those on low incomes to upskill. It is designed as an anti-poverty tool and to support people as they transition into work and up their hours. So I ask my noble friend the Minister: what changes are the Government considering to universal credit conditionality to support their excellent approach to skills development?

But this Bill is important not only as an anti-poverty tool; it is also hugely important for employers. Many businesses report a deterioration of local conditions for enterprise, including skills shortages and barriers to doing business. Assessments of adult skills generally point to skills mismatches and many employers report that a lack of skilled workers is a major and increasing bottleneck for their operations, affecting their capacity to innovate. On average, 26% of vacancies are generated by skills shortages within businesses. This is as high as 36% in, say, the south-east. Across a range of sectors, there is a growing employer demand for the skills that higher technical education provides.

The White Paper highlights the need for technicians, engineers and health and social care professionals to meet the many vital challenges we face as a society. Investing in these skills at both a local and a national level is critical to improving our productivity and international competitiveness. Our skills system has been very efficient at producing graduates but has been less able to help people get the quality technical skills that employers want. A stat that we have heard quoted today is that 4% of young people achieve a qualification at higher technical level by the age of 25, compared with the 33% who get a degree or above. Just imagine if we could have a society where 33% achieve higher technical level qualifications as well as 33% getting a degree.

I am delighted to be supporting a Bill that will enable people to invest in their ability to earn more for each hour they work, that will enable employers to develop their businesses using the incredible talents of the British people and that will enable us to compete on the world stage at this critical moment of transition for us as a nation.