Queen’s Speech

Lord Broers Excerpts

Thursday 4th June 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Broers (CB)]

My Lords, as a microelectronics engineer who spent his first 20 years in industry, it is perhaps appropriate that I follow the noble Lord, Lord Fox, and a lot of what I shall say resonates with what he has just said.

It is a great privilege to speak in this debate. With other noble Lords, I was immensely impressed by the outstanding maiden speeches of the noble Lords, Lord O’Neill and Lord King. It is hugely encouraging that they have come to join us and help us in finding ways to strengthen our economy.

Like many other noble Lords, I wish to concentrate on manufacturing. The best way to reduce our deficit and bring our economy into balance is surely to increase our manufacturing output. To do this, we need to make our products more innovative and attractive to customers, reshore a significant fraction of our manufacturing and, most importantly, improve our productivity. Much has been gained over the past few years and there have been signs of a real renaissance in our manufacturing capability. Disappointingly, however, output has levelled off during the past year and, once again, manufacturing is lagging behind the financial and services sector, leaving our economy unbalanced. It is vital that we maintain our focus on manufacturing.

During the past two weeks, I have chaired for the fourth time the national manufacturing debate at Cranfield University, this year with the theme of reshoring. I also chaired a session of a Westminster Employment Forum focused on higher apprenticeships. Many of the critical factors affecting our manufacturing performance surfaced at these events and I want to talk about three of them.

First is the need to maintain and grow the support to the catapults, just mentioned. We now have seven catapults already producing innovative advances derived from research in industry and academia that will lead to better products and more efficient manufacturing, and two that began operations this April. Dick Elsy, the director of the first catapult, the High Value Manufacturing Catapult, told us at Cranfield about the success of this flagship example. It now operates at seven different sites and works on manufacturing processes that range from the production of Rolls-Royce turbine engines to plastic electronics. It is pleasing that the TSB, now Innovate UK, was able to exceed the original funding limits and allow it to expand. The other catapults are also doing well, although there is a worry that the regulations governing the provision of government funding to these centres places constraints on their operation that may impair entrepreneurship, but hopefully Innovate UK will keep an eye on this and not let it dull their performance.

As many of your Lordships will know, the catapults are a UK version of the German Fraunhofer centres, but we have a very long way to go before we will compete with the power of those German equivalents. Hermann Hauser, who proposed the catapults, points out that there are 77 Fraunhofers versus our seven to nine catapults. Each of the Fraunhofers is about the same size as the catapults, with more than €3 billion of support, and there are 55 potential Fraunhofers in waiting. He thinks that it is important that there should be a steady increase in the number of catapults—about two or three a year. These have the potential for being the life-blood of our manufacturing recovery, but only if they continue to receive adequate support.

The second factor affecting our manufacturing performance that I wish to talk about, as many other noble Lords have done, is skills, and specifically the need for coherence in the two branches of our higher education system: the university branch and the apprentice branch. One of the speakers at the employment forum that I chaired described our higher education system as a series of pieces from a jigsaw puzzle, mostly of high quality but none of them fitting together. In particular, the qualifications for the different levels of apprenticeship are not adequately defined, especially with respect to the theoretical knowledge required to attain a given level.

It is felt by senior industrialists who I have spoken to that the Government need to help in determining these standards. At present they are established in an ad hoc manner by individual companies and the standards of attainment are too variable—they are all over the place and, to be blunt, not fit for purpose. There is also a tendency for the vocational or apprentice branch to be considered only by those who cannot get into a university. The result of this has been a serious shortage of what Europeans call master craftsmen. This was emphasised at Cranfield as a serious issue that may limit our ability to reshore manufacturing. The strong emphasis that the Government place on apprenticeships is admirable, but the qualifications needed to reach the different levels of apprenticeship need to be defined and enforced.

Finally, I wish to stress the need to place more emphasis on the needs of medium-sized businesses. It was pointed out at Cranfield that it was unfortunate in many ways that we almost universally refer to SMEs, small and medium-sized enterprises, as if they were the same and have the same needs. They are not the same. We are better at creating and supporting companies than we are at supporting and growing companies that are already established. I have raised this issue before. Our financial sector needs to learn how to assess the potential of these businesses and fund them, and not leave it to the Americans to have free access to our successful mid-sized companies just as they are ready to take off, thereby depriving us of the boost they could make to our manufacturing output.