Skills and Post-16 Education Bill [HL]

Lord Cormack Excerpts

2nd reading
Tuesday 15th June 2021 Lords Chamber

[The Deputy Speaker (Lord Faulkner of Worcester) (Lab)]

The noble Baroness, Lady Lane-Fox of Soho, is appearing remotely. We can see her but we cannot hear her.

[Lord Cormack (Con)]

The noble Lord, Lord Puttnam, is sorting her out.

[The Deputy Speaker (Lord Faulkner of Worcester) (Lab)]

We will go to the noble Baroness, Lady Morgan of Cotes.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Cormack (Con)]

My Lords, it is a great pleasure to take part in this debate. I begin, as many others have, by paying a tribute to the noble Baroness, Lady Black of Strome, who made a fascinating and somewhat gruesome maiden speech. I look forward to hearing her again on those subjects and in more detail. I long for the day when this Chamber is full again, when we can have a proper debate, without too many colleagues Zooming in.

I will concentrate on one issue in particular, which is an aspect of the construction industry, about which the noble Lord, Lord Stunell, spoke with some passion and deep knowledge. I declare my interest as the founder and chairman of the William Morris Craft Fellowship programme and the first vice-president of the Heritage Crafts Association.

As many of your Lordships know, I am passionate about restoring buildings, particularly this one and Lincoln Cathedral, which I look at from my home every time I am back on the weekends or in recess. I am acutely conscious that great buildings, such as this one, Lincoln Cathedral and churches around the country—often focal points of their local communities—are in greater danger than they have been for many a long year. It is partly a consequence of the pandemic: many churches have been shut for months and have deteriorated. Many are bat-infested, which is a real problem that I have talked about in your Lordships’ House before. We owe these buildings to craftsmen and, more recently to crafts men and women, through the ages. One evening every month in Lincoln Cathedral, when we generally pray for those who have been benefactors or achieved great things, we pray for the unknown by name who created that great building. It is the same here and in every parish church in the country.

We founded the William Morris Craft Fellowship, named after that great pioneer—also a great socialist, but I will not talk about that—in the 19th century because of his dedication to the arts and proper restoration. We sought to find mainly young crafts men and women around the country who showed enormous potential but who had all been through a long apprenticeship. I say in parenthesis that one of the things that disturbs me about the Bill is that it does not confront “apprenticeship” properly. The word has been too loosely used in recent years, even attached to flower-arranging courses that last nine months—although I say nothing against flower arranging.

To master a craft is a long, arduous and challenging business. We were looking for those who had done so, who had shown great interest in kindred crafts—because you cannot be master of your own unless you understand others—and who showed the potential to be able to take charge of important sites. Over the last 35 years since we founded this fellowship, we have chosen well over 100 mainly young men and women who have gone on to do all manner of things, including writing notable books about the subject.

That is why I am so much in sympathy with my noble friend Lord Willetts when he talked about not having an artificial distinction between the academic and the vocational. I am a great believer in vocation. I consider that those of us in this place, and in the other place where I had the honour to serve for 40 years, are following a vocation to public service. It is desperately important that we encourage more and more young people to realise that by working with their hands they are also using their brains and helping to create or preserve things of great beauty.

I mentioned the other day, when we were we were talking about the Environment Bill, the importance of constructing buildings of quality today—I cited the Prince of Wales on Poundbury—but the noble Lord, Lord Stunell, was right: there are not enough who have mastered their crafts. I share the concerns of the noble Baroness, Lady Blackstone, about the delay in the implementation of aspects of the Bill, but I hope there will be a real emphasis on encouraging young people to embrace real crafts and to help to create or preserve those buildings of beauty in which the history of our country is embodied and will continue to be built.