Foreign Workers: Engineers

Lord Bates Excerpts

Wednesday 10th February 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Soley]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what assessment they have made of the ability of British manufacturers to recruit engineers from overseas who are suitably qualified.

[The Minister of State, Home Office (Lord Bates) (Con)]

My Lords, where no suitable resident worker is available companies may recruit non-EEA engineers to graduate-level roles using the tier 2 skilled work route. Where there is a shortage of applicants, engineering roles are prioritised under the tier 2 limit and employers are not required to advertise the positions before recruiting non-EEA nationals.

[Lord Soley (Lab)]

Will the Minister agree to review the way tier 2 is working? It is seriously bad news for small—particularly high-tech—companies which want to recruit overseas but cannot build up a base of experience and have no knowledge of why they get refused. They then have to apply again and often lose the person they need. It is doing a lot of damage to us overseas. If the Minister will not agree to review it, will he at least be prepared to see some representatives of that industry who I could happily bring to see him to explain why they find it damaging to both productivity and British reputation overseas?

[Lord Bates]

The tier 2 limit is kept under review by the Migration Advisory Committee, which is an independent committee. It produced a report on tier 2, making a number of recommendations that we are still considering. The key point is that we want to build a more sustainable workforce where the skills needed by engineers—in technology and those areas—are in the resident labour market and do not require people to recruit employees from outside the EEA area.

[Lord Harrison (Lab)]

Would a modern Brunel and Pugin be excluded from the current employment applications?

[Lord Bates]

I do not know about that—obviously, the measure was not in place at that time or for their nationality. What I do know at this time is that we are investing heavily in science skills in this country. We have new science A-levels, new university technical colleges and a new science and technology baccalaureate, and the number of apprenticeships in science and manufacturing is up 74%. I think that that would be welcomed on all sides of the House and by Brunel and Pugin, if they were around.

[Earl Attlee (Con)]

My Lords, the standing of a professional engineer in Germany is much higher than in the UK. What are the Minister and the Government doing to enhance the social standing of professional engineers in the UK?

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Bates]

My noble friend is absolutely right. We need to do more. We talk a lot about raising productivity. We talk about raising skills. We aspire to be a high-skills, high-wage economy. Engineering and manufacturing in the modern world will be a critical part of that. That is why we need to raise their standing. That means raising the quality of apprenticeships. We set this out in English Apprenticeships: Our 2020 Vision, which talked about introducing degree-level apprenticeships in these areas. However, there is much more to be done to ensure that science and technology engineers have the status in our society that they deserve.

[Baroness Howe of Idlicote (CB)]

My Lords, given the wish to have a much higher level of aspiring engineers from our own country, can the Minister tell us how successful we are as far as women engineers are concerned? Are their training and skills at the levels they should be in our own profession?

[Lord Bates]

I would never say that they are at the right level; we need to do more. However, I think there are many role models and examples of women who have succeeded in the worlds of science and engineering and we need to point to them. We should also encourage more science students to take up the degree-level qualifications required by our growing employment sector.

[Baroness Burt of Solihull (LD)]

Does the Minister really think that it is sensible to persist with a net immigration target that actually hinders manufacturers and other businesses from bringing in specially trained staff from overseas, while at the same time freezing in real terms support for further education to train the people we need here at home? What projections have the Government made on the impact that this will have on our competitiveness in the global market?

[Lord Bates]

I do not accept the premise of the question, which is that we are not investing. We are introducing the apprentice levy. We are introducing the immigration skills surcharge. The number of apprenticeships has gone up from 1.5 million to 3 million and that of science and technology apprenticeships by 74%. We are investing £200 million in universities’ science and engineering capital funds. We are doing all those things in the expectation that industry will not then go out shopping for employees overseas but will actually use the talent we have grown here at home.

[Lord Rosser (Lab)]

My Lords, according to EngineeringUK, Britain needs to recruit 1.8 million engineers by 2022 just to stand still. Yesterday, the Government told us during Committee on the Immigration Bill that no decisions had been made on the rate and scope of their proposed new immigration skills charge on recruitment from outside the EU—which means, of course, that this House is being denied information on precisely what it is being asked to agree to. Are the Government actually considering applying the skills charge—which could be £1,000 per year—to expanding and successful firms which, due to severe recruitment difficulties, can fill all their vacancies for highly skilled engineers only by recruiting from outside the EU?

[Lord Bates]

First, to the noble Lord’s charge that we are somehow denying the House information, the report produced by the Migration Advisory Committee was received on 19 January; it is now 10 February. The Government have a duty to consult on and consider the findings of the report before we make further decisions. I come back to the central point: we cannot keep saying that we need to bridge the skills gap and raise productivity levels in this country and then create a loophole whereby people can avoid recruiting perfectly qualified and able people in this country and go overseas to recruit them instead. That is not good for Britain in the long term, it is not sustainable, and that is what we want to change.

[Baroness Wolf of Dulwich (CB)]

My Lords, over the past 15 years there has been an enormous increase in the number of engineering undergraduates in British universities, yet we seem to have made remarkably little progress in bridging the skills gap. In fact, engineering graduates have a higher than average unemployment rate six months after graduation. Are the Government acting to investigate and explain why this enormous increase in investment in engineering in universities appears to be having so little impact in the labour market?

[Lord Bates]

We certainly are in contact with the universities, and there is ongoing dialogue between the Department for Education, the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills and the engineering and manufacturing organisations. We need to tackle that, but we argue that the way to do so is to ensure that those graduates coming out of British universities, having invested their energy and time in this country, are among the first in the queue to be considered for the jobs and opportunities open to them.