Industrial Strategy

Lord Addington Excerpts

Monday 8th January 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Addington (LD)]

My Lords, when you speak in a debate such as this it is quite odd to discover that you want to take a slight deviation in approach. So far all the speeches have, understandably, concentrated on the macro situation—the broader picture. In doing so they have covered the variety of subjects in the strategy’s structure. I think it was the noble Lord, Lord Maude, who suggested that it is a compendium of policies brought together. I will focus on the second—people—and on one specific area.

I have for many years—I thought about it and discovered that it has been over four Parliaments and three Governments—been talking about the role of apprenticeships and how they are, or are not, allowing those with certain disabilities to take advantage of them. This an appropriate point to remind the House of my declared interests, particularly in dyslexia and assisted technology. We have moved on from a situation where you had to pass an English test to get into the apprenticeship system, which I think the noble Lord, Lord Nash, eventually dealt with by saying that it was ridiculous to have this for somebody who was dyslexic or had one of the other hidden conditions. It means that you have problems with writing, or indeed doing an online test. Therefore, a change was made.

We have now moved on to doing something that is equally stupid. Indeed, the cock-up school of history seems to have come back to us in apprenticeships. In a component part of skilling up people’s skill set, we have found yet another little example of where, if you take your eye off the minutiae of what is going on, you will make a change. We have said that we will help only those with an education, health and care plan. For those who have not been immersed in the education system for quite as long as I have, the education, health and care plan identifies that you have a disability at a fairly high level. The problem is that it is at a fairly high level. Just under 3% of the school population are recognised as having this. Some 12% are regarded as having a disability. We have a nine percentage-point gap of people who may have problems that may mean they cannot access the written word very well.

In the modern world there is no reason why that should block you, for the simple reason that voice technology is now so common. Voice-to-text or voice-to-voice technology for taking and passing assessments is incredibly common. It is old technology. Dyslexics going through the education system would probably have been the first big group to use it. I have been using it for nearly 20 years. It was introduced to me by the computer department of the House of Lords, when we still had one. I met a group of RAF pilots for whom it was developed because they had run out of fingers when flying jets. It is a very practical form of technology. But if we help only the group with the highest level of identification, all those in the other group will not get the support they need to get a qualification.

We have moved to a world where we need qualified people and we expect to have them organised and structured. If we put artificial barriers in place, such as having to pass an English test if you have been identified as having a disability, while not allowing people to take it in the way they will probably access it in their lives, when you can write a note to somebody that appears on a screen by talking to a computer—every single computer has that capacity; your phone has that capacity—we are excluding a block of people from higher levels of training. I ask the Minister to go back and make sure that those in the skills sector start to address these problems correctly and deal with the absurdity of taking a group away and saying, “No, we’ll restrict our skills base; we’ll restrict your earning power and leave you there”.

This is a good example of one of the problems we have. When we looked at the Government’s recent Statement about health and disability, it became quite clear that they had not taken on board people in jobs who are often unidentified as having a disability. I cited that 12% figure. Everything shows that many people have been unidentified in the past and currently, particularly at the edges, those who are struggling or underachieving do not expand their jobs or take on further qualifications. When we try to get the best out of our workforce, can we make sure that we start to identify these groups and help get qualifications for them through?

It is often said that to be a successful disabled person in our society, you need one fundamental bit of luck and that is your parents. The “tiger” parent is the person who has that plan, the person who has the identification that allows you to go forward. I have not even talked about the university sector, where exactly the same principle applies. The problem is that many people in the apprenticeship sector are late-diagnosis or undiagnosed. Those training them are still undertrained. However, we have a far greater incentive to make sure that we find and identify these groups if we can get them through the qualifications—if there was incentive in the institutions they are in to identify them, train them and get them through. If the Government insist on setting such an incredibly high barrier for giving help, they will exclude most of the people who have been identified as needing it. They would be helping those who have the greatest problems in later life and not those who would probably succeed with a smaller degree of intervention. Even if we regard people only as economic units, it is idiocy. Will the Government make sure that the appropriate levels of support are available, meaning that you will be able to access the structure and with easier transfer of information and data analysis between bodies? If we do not do that, we will create a block and a drag factor on any structure and any plan for industrial development. Unless we can bring this group into the trained world and world of work generally at a high enough level, we will always have those who slow us down. It is not very difficult. I am talking only about using information that is already out there and the existing structure, and about the existing pattern of development whereby we are told, “You will now talk to your computer as opposed to tapping the keyboard”.

Can we please have some more development here and some indication that the Government are looking at how those in the disabilities sector will be helped and supported to make them productive members of society? I have not many met of them who do not want to join that group.