Skills: Importance for the UK Economy and Quality of Life

Lord Griffiths of Burry Port Excerpts

Thursday 9th May 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Griffiths of Burry Port (Lab)]

My Lords, I give the noble Baroness the Minister the assurance that I will not repeat that party trick in a moment.

I stepped down from the Communications and Digital Select Committee just three months ago. It was an invigorating experience, spending three years looking at developments in the fields we were examining and interrogating various experts from the top of a number of industries and experiences. It seems that there is a paucity of contributors from that committee, so I bring to the attention of noble Lords an inkling of just two of the reports we brought out. Since the work has been done, I want to emphasise that we can refer to it at any time we like.

One report, on our creative future, was published just a year ago and there is a whole chapter on the skills that we need. Some 88% of employers in the creative occupations find it hard to recruit high-level skilled individuals, compared with 38% of employers across the economy. Someone we interrogated said that skills were currently the single biggest inhibitor of growth. Meanwhile, international competition for creative skills is growing, including creative, technical, cultural management and business skills, and this is likely to intensify. Those are just three or four allusions to a rich chapter that fleshes out the need for creative skills of all kinds in our creative industries, which make such an important contribution to the economy of our country. Since our country’s economy is well stated in the Motion from the noble Lord, Lord Aberdare—it is lovely to see him in his place and giving us the opportunity to discuss these things—we must draw attention to the fact that one sector of our economy is particularly hard hit by the absence of skills.

The other report to which I draw attention relates to fulfilling the second requirement of the Motion, which is for our personal development, and that is Digital Exclusion—or digital inclusion; which would we prefer? It is a fact that, for ordinary, everyday tasks, we lack the skills simply to do the things that are required of us. I left the house this morning, and my poor wife was coping with problems with our internet provider, needing to know language, to have patience and to entertain various options for which she was never trained, though she had a highly technical education and work pattern as a radiographer in the health industry. I myself have got yet again today what I regularly get, which is an imprecation from my bank to do internet banking. I utterly refuse, because I will not give the banks the opportunity to say that they have now mopped up all the remaining recidivists: people like me who will not modernise themselves or live in the modern world. I will say to my bankers that they should continue to send me my monthly paper statement, because that is an important thing for so many people.

We have heard that there has not been a properly developed strategy for skills since 2014, and it was spelled out just what needs to be in that strategy. One of the recurring things that we heard in all the committee meetings was that this need for skills branches out into so many aspects of ordinary, everyday living that we must have cross-departmental approaches to evolving this strategy. It is no good leaving it to the Department for Education, or science and technology or whatever it is. This impacts on the whole of our lives. It needs a dedicated body of people to look at this constantly in relation to the various departments of government. Formal cross-government evaluations seem to have stopped. They need to be reworked and rebegun.

The Government, of course, cannot be expected to solve everything, but they can achieve much by showing interest in driving change against clearly defined objectives. The committee said:

“We have no confidence that this is happening. Senior political leadership to drive joined-up concerted action is sorely needed”.


I could go on, but the reports are there. I place the underlying questions of my intervention in the hands of the Minister in the hope that she can give us some concrete evidence of progress in these areas. It will also reinforce my confidence that the work of our Select Committees gets heard and is implemented, and that their ideas are taken forward.