Industrial Strategy: Engagement

Lord Broers Excerpts

Monday 27th February 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Prior of Brampton]

My Lords, the noble Baroness is absolutely right. The link between employee engagement and performance, however you measure it, whether in productivity or quality, is proven, so engagement is extremely important. However, I do not believe that just having someone on the board of a company is necessarily the right way of getting that engagement, as the noble Baroness mentioned. Engagement is much deeper than that. It is predominantly the responsibility of individual companies to tackle this. You can see the resulting performance when they get it right.

[Lord Broers (CB)]

My Lords, I have just come from a meeting of the Institution of Engineering and Technology at which it launched its report Skills and Demand in Industry. The one thing it pointed out to everybody was that only 9% of technology and engineering staff are women, yet 15% of them graduate from our engineering schools and in my own university of Cambridge the figure is over 20%. What are the Government doing to ensure that more women become engineers in industry and participate in it, especially through the apprentice route?

[Lord Prior of Brampton]

It is interesting that only 15% of women graduate in this subject. In the case of medicine, for example, the figure is now well over 50% and is nearly 60%. It is a very good question. Interestingly, I went to Rolls-Royce last week and met a number of apprentices there, some of whom are doing degree-level apprenticeships. That may be one way of increasing the number of women going into this area. It has been a problem for many years and we are only in the foothills of cracking it.