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

Catherine Atkinson Excerpts

2nd reading
Tuesday 25th February 2025 Commons Chamber

[Catherine Atkinson (Derby North) (Lab)]

I am proud to be a Derby MP and to represent a city with incredible engineering, manufacturing and technological expertise and skills. We make things in Derby. Yes, we have industrial giants such as Rolls-Royce, Alstom and Toyota, but we also have the brilliant small and medium-sized companies in their supply chains and more broadly, from a wide range of industries including rail, defence, nuclear energy, food production, aviation and digital technology.

What attracts so many businesses to Derby is our skilled workforce, but I know that even our city feels this country’s skills shortages. Under the previous Government, a third of UK job vacancies were a result of skills shortages, and the uptake of level 4 and 5 technical training in England fell to historically low levels. I warmly welcome the Bill, which lays the groundwork for the establishment of Skills England to assess and help to address our skills shortages.

Larger companies in Derby have been investing in skills and apprenticeships. The Rolls-Royce nuclear skills academy, for example, offers 200 apprenticeships a year, working with the University of Derby and Derby college. The Toyota academy provides skills not just for its own apprentices but for partner companies too. Many of our small and medium-sized employers are investing in their future by investing in skills, such as tech company Barron McCann, which I recently visited, and engineering firm Tidyco, which supports apprentices but also goes into local schools to teach young people the metalwork skills they need to make metal toolboxes. However, I have met many businesses that say that finding skilled workers is one of the greatest challenges they face and that under the last Government, they found apprenticeships too difficult and too inflexible to access.

We are fortunate in Derby to have Derby College, which is one of the largest FE colleges in the UK, and University Technical College Derby, which both work closely with employers to ensure they are providing the skills needed. One of the students told me that what he loved about learning at the UTC was that he felt he was learning something real. We have more than 3,000 apprentices in Derby, but I know that we need many, many more, and it is not just people starting out who need careers; we also need to reskill our workforce and allow those in mid-career to move into new roles and new industries.

I want to raise skills shortages in a sector close to my heart. Last week, my hon. Friend the Member for Derby South (Baggy Shanker) and I held a meeting organised for us by the Rail Forum with the rail sector about skills. I often meet people in rail who talk about the sector as Britain’s best kept secret, with people sometimes joining by accident but staying because of the range of opportunities it offers, from engineering to customer services, project management to catering, digital roles, technicians and many more.

The Rail Delivery Group identifies that rail adds some £98 billion annually to local economies and £26 billion in environmental and social benefits, but the National Skills Academy for Rail reports that a third of the rail workforce are 50 or over and estimates that some 75,000 people will leave the industry by 2030 through retirement or other forms of attrition. This year is the 200th anniversary of the modern railway, which we as a country pioneered, and its future is crucial for growth and decarbonisation. I invite the Minister to encourage Skills England to work with the National Skills Academy for Rail and Great British Railways, which will have its headquarters in Derby, to address the skills shortages we face in rail.

I am really excited that under this Government, we are going to have a proper industrial strategy, and it is essential that we have the right skills and the right infrastructure to get the people and the goods where they need to be. I echo the call from my hon. Friend the Member for Peterborough (Andrew Pakes) for Ministers to set out how Skills England will work across Departments to support our industrial strategy. I urge all Members across the House to support this Bill. I look forward to working with Skills England to ensure that we have the skills we need, that we have opportunities for all and that we keep our economy on track.