Technology and People: Deloitte Report

Lord Addington Excerpts

Wednesday 13th April 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Addington (LD)]

My Lords, we should thank the noble Lord, Lord Borwick, for bringing this debate forward. This is a short report and it is probably fair to sum it up as having a fairly traditional view: that the invisible hand of the capitalist system will bring us to a nice answer. When the report talks about technology we should start by remembering that even if the whole of society benefits, there are always pockets left behind. The way that we deal with those pockets might be a better test of the society and how it works than looking at the overall picture, because you end up wasting a great deal of money when you leave people behind.

When you get rid of an industry, that leaves lots of men—it traditionally has been men—past the traditional age of schooling and without a structure behind them. When they are left behind, you cannot get at them culturally or put resources into retraining them to take on new jobs and enable them to move to where those jobs might be placed. You will pay for that problem for a very long time, particularly if they leave a family behind who do not think that you are supposed to pass exams or have a job. This is just one of those things which we have to deal with. It is not new but it is continuing and unless we address it, the rosy words that go around the rest of this do not really mean much.

Having said that, I come to the point of technology and my own relationship with it. When it comes to new technology, I have been using, in my day-to-day life, stuff that was science fiction when I was a child. I use voice-operation technology because I am dyslexic. Any letter which I have sent to any Member of this House has been sent by talking to a metal and plastic box which is technically attuned to pick up the vibrations in the air and translate those into words that are printed on a screen or paper. Thirty years ago, this was pure science fiction, such as in “Star Trek”, where they had a chat to the computer on the wall. We have not quite got round to having sarcastic comments back from it yet. I might also point out that there are certain mistakes which only these things can make. Although I can now spot them as they come out, I have become something of a master of sending letters with a wrong word that sounds just about right but means something completely different—so none of this is perfect.

We have to be trained to use this new technology and, as the rate of change goes on, to be better at intervening to top up the training. The noble Baroness, Lady Rock, spoke about education. The traditional model of education, where you go through various points on a conveyor belt, simply does not apply if you are to get to all those who are difficult to reach in society, or if we change the criteria by which we want people trained, because what we want them to do has changed. We have to get more flexible about this.

I should also declare another interest: I am chairman of the company Microlink, which deals with technical changes for those with disabilities, primarily in adaptation. We find ourselves having to do this frequently and often later in life because many of the conditions that we deal with are age related. But unless you intervene at certain points to keep the skills that people have, and to give them new skills to allow them to go back in, you are always going to create waste and have people left behind on the scrapheap. So although the innovation and the chances to make great change are there, they do not come totally free or sugar-coated. You are going to have to make changes to get through this, while relying on the fact that you will leave problems behind you.

That is probably why I felt that the tone of the report was a little glib. It assumes that everything will be great in the end. What do you do with the casualties of the change, or with the out-of-date ideas that are dominating your education system? Even where things can be changed, I have had numerous battles with the education and training programmes that state, “You must be able to write English”. The fact is that they have been excluding dyslexics, but that is only one group; others have problems with literacy as well. We have the technology to allow them into the system to get the information back, forgetting that reading and writing is a way of transferring information. It is not some voodoo thing that separates us from the savage but a way of conveying information. Unless we start to think in slightly different ways about the opportunities of technology, we will leave more and more people behind—and possibly even more of them if we do not adapt to the way that we change its use. These are the challenges that we must embrace and remember because if we do not, we will not get the full benefits.