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.

Religious Education in Schools

Lord Griffiths of Burry Port Excerpts

Thursday 18th January 2024 Grand Committee

[Lord Griffiths of Burry Port (Lab)]

My Lords, I am delighted to be part of this debate. The noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Harries, is to be thanked for yet again bringing it to our attention; it is as lamentable as he has said. The two of us have contributed to “Thought for the Day” for many years, and we both know how to tailor our remarks to two and three-quarter minutes. I feel quite at odds with him in this debate where he has 10 minutes and I have three.

I have counted, throughout my time as a Methodist minister, the number of years I have spent in the governance of schools: it amounts to well over 40. These have included every kind of secondary school that you can imagine—voluntary aided, academies, state sector, comprehensives, private schools too—and the shaping of a university at Roehampton where our denominational input was of some use. Over this time where I have been involved practically in this way, the situation has become ever more dire.

Since it is required of the education that we offer to our young people that the spiritual and religious be part of what a good education is considered to be, that raises all kinds of questions. I wonder, for example, why between 2016 and 2021 no government money was spent on RE projects in schools. I hope the Minister knows why or where it has been hidden for future use. When in September 2023 a joint letter was sent by the Religious Education Council to the Secretary of State, Gillian Keegan, pointing out a shortfall in this area, within a month it was discovered that the initial teacher training bursary was to be reintroduced for September 2024 entrants. Why did it have to be reintroduced? Why was it not there in the first place?

I know that the way that we look at and feel about religion varies from person to person and that it can produce great difficulties, because people feel that those with religion want to have an angle on the educational curriculum of a school to introduce and emphasise the things that are important to them. I do not think that is the case. I am a member of the British humanist society and its APPG here for the simple reason that I, like they and all religious people, believe in the humanum and that it is our duty, wherever our values are to be found, to seek the well-being of humanity at large. I certainly do not want religion to be categorised as simply reneging on its promises or undermining its commitments.

With those brief words—my one “Thought for the Day”—I can now leave the field open for others.

Education (Non-religious Philosophical Convictions) Bill [HL]

Lord Griffiths of Burry Port Excerpts

2nd reading
Friday 3rd February 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Griffiths of Burry Port (Lab)]

My Lords, it is a privilege to take part in this debate and I am grateful to the noble Baroness for giving us this opportunity to do so now. I say also, with an extraterritorial hint, how appropriate it is to be debating this while there are schoolchildren present in the Public Gallery. That adds lustre to the whole occasion.

I have opted to speak in this debate largely because, first, such progress was made the last time an attempt was made, and it was just time that was lacking. This attempt to resurrect what has already been before us is therefore welcome. Secondly, since the Commission on Religious Education produced its report in 2018, it seems sad that the Government have not felt that it was timely yet to respond—although, as the noble Baroness has properly said, in Wales there were no such constraints. The matter has been on the statute book for some time and I cannot think, coming as I do from nonconformist Christian Wales, that anything has imploded yet. We are moving in the right direction.

Perhaps I may express a potentially conflictual interest: I was once president of the Methodist Conference, and therefore a national religious leader. That ought to be brought into play as people estimate and evaluate what my intervention is all about.

I wholeheartedly approve of this very clear and logical Bill. I hope that it gets the kind of support that it deserves. For too long, we have pussyfooted around on this and I hope we can be clear in our judgment today. However, I do not want it to be thought that this is a mere defensive ploy on my part: namely, that because we have enjoyed privileges and suchlike in the past, and recognising that things are in decline now, we want to make the most of that—to manage the decline, if you like—or that we will make such concessions as we have to, to slow the process down as much as we can. In case anybody thinks so, that is not my motivation at all.

Let me remind those who have a read a book or two of a statement that was made in 1644. “I cannot praise”, said the author,

“a … cloistered virtue unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out and sees her adversary, but slinks out of the race where that immortal garland is to be run for, not without dust and heat.”

That is from the Areopagitica, written by John Milton, in 1644. I bring that into my remarks to say that it is about time that we Christians put our faith out into the marketplace, where it can hold its own or not according to the interplay of forces and realities that exist in the real world that we live in. I relish the thought of being a Christian in such a world where openness, transparency and fearlessness exist.

I wanted to make it clear that, although a religious leader, I speak at this moment for myself—I might have some interesting exchanges on the floor of the annual Methodist Conference about this, and I will be happy enough about that—and it was for that reason that I quoted John Milton, not just for the quotation but because he was a great humanist. Six years before the Areopagitica, he went on a European tour as a young man, with the sole objective of meeting all the humanist thinkers in Europe. He started in Paris and went off to Italy—Sicily, Rome, Florence and Venice. He met Galileo in Florence and was lionised by Europe; I wish there were more British people lionised by Europe in our day. For all that, he was a humanist because Christianity itself should understand that, beyond the faith it adheres to, which gives Christians their sense of values, lies a common human cause to which everybody belongs and aspires to represent.

It is in that sense that I have joined the British Humanist Association because, like others in that association, I believe that the flourishing of humanity is what we all aim at. If I may therefore express just a tiny regret in closing: I long to see the British Humanist Association move from defining itself as anti-religious to being a force for good with others who collaborate, whether they are religious or not, in building a better world for our children and our children’s children.