Technology and People: Deloitte Report

Lord Fox Excerpts

Wednesday 13th April 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Fox (LD)]

I draw your Lordships’ attention to my interest in GKN, which is a technology and engineering company. Noble Lords will be pleased to know that I will not be regaling them with tales of my holiday job in a chocolate factory, except to say that it is nowhere near as good as it sounds.

We should welcome this report and the opportunity to have this discussion, as we have too few like it in this place. It is helpful to start from a positive rather than a negative narrative. We should all accept that fantastic opportunities present themselves and that these will be created by technology.

The title of the report includes the words “Technology and People”, and it is the people bit on which I want to dwell a little because it is the people of this country who will make this happen and who will be affected by it. The report, rightly, shies away from trying to draw a picture of what the future looks like, but works hard at trying to describe the type of people who will benefit in this world. It very clearly shows, as the first speaker said, how routine work has already been massively curtailed and reduced. It places a big onus on the education system of the future to foster and create people who are capable of what it rather dryly refers to as “cognitive, non-routine tasks”. Within that, there is tremendous variation, but for the future to be positive in this country the majority of the people who live here have to be capable of embracing that cognitive, non-routine future. I think the noble Lord, Lord Borwick, made that point; the noble Lord, Lord Giddens, certainly did.

How good are we at this today? We heard a little about accountants, so I thought we might talk a little about engineers and engineering instead. I sit on the Royal Academy of Engineering’s engineering talent project. This initiative is looking very seriously at how we can generate sufficient engineers over the near, medium and long term to address this country’s needs. It is a tremendously difficult and pressing task that we have in front of us. At the current rate we will have a massive shortfall of the engineers we need.

Analysis of the situation shows great profligacy when it comes to nurturing future engineering students and practitioners through our schools. We have what the task force called a “leaky pipeline”. If noble Lords look at the traditional pathway to engineering—of course, there are a number of other pathways—and start with 100 girls or 100 boys, only 0.2 of the girls or 1.6 of the boys will make it to an engineering job. That is a tremendously leaky pipeline. It is not that they are incapable of doing the subjects. Many of them, if not most, are capable at the start, but by the time they come through they have dwindled from 100 to, in the case of girls, 0.2. Bear in mind the current situation, where, for every new engineer recruited, one and a half retire. That gives noble Lords a measure of the problem.

This is one example where we are failing to impart the sort of skills that we need for this cognitive, non-routine future. It is important because engineering’s problems are not atypical of the sort of skills and people who will be needed to embrace the future we see in this report. Of course, it is not straightforward and it requires a range of responses. It would be useful to hear what the Minister believes our response as a nation should be to this challenge. Clearly, looking at education, we have to find a way to value science and science teachers, to increase their numbers and empower them to teach these subjects. We have to raise the status of unfashionable subjects, such as physics, which is gradually emerging. Mathematics has also become more popular than it was, but there is still a long way to go to encourage schools sometimes to allow their pupils to take these exams, because there is a perception that the results may not be so good and their school may be marked down in league tables. That is something where the Government can look at how Ofsted deals with schools that are embracing bringing young people through with these kinds of subjects, which are often harder to get the highest grades for.

We need to build bridges for people. The pathway to either a STEM or an arts, non-STEM career diverges very early in life. It is time that young people—and, indeed, older people through their lives—have the opportunity and flexibility to cross back into the STEM arena and express themselves in that way.

We need action so that the UK can positively embrace this future and we need that action to centre around people and their skills. I look forward to hearing how we can do that.