Apprenticeships

Lord Haskel Excerpts

Thursday 14th October 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord Haskel]

My Lords, this is an important debate because apprenticeships touch so many of our current problems, economic and social, including the need to grow the economy, raising our level of technical skills—as my noble friend Lord Bhattacharyya, explained—and the need to provide people to fill the 2 million jobs that the private sector will have to create. Many of those jobs will need to be in manufacturing. It should be remembered that each manufacturing job supports several service jobs, not the other way around.

Immigration happens not because of lax borders, but because we are short of the skills that immigrants bring. One reason why we have so many immigrant workers, particularly from European states, is that those countries have well developed apprenticeship programmes for doing jobs for which in Britain there is no formal training requirement. Many of those jobs are in the construction industry, such as ground work or foundation building. One of our largest areas of unemployment and social deprivation is among young people. Apprenticeships help to get these people to work. My noble friend Lord Sugar and other businessmen have voiced their concerns at the low level of skills and education that prospective employees bring to the workplace. Apprenticeship schemes do something about this.

My noble friend Lady Wall told us that the days of just learning at the bench and serving time are long past. Yes, apprentices have to learn the technical skills, but they also have to understand them. To get their qualifications, apprentices also have to acquire the modern soft skills of numeracy, literacy, personal communication and presentation. All this has helped to make apprenticeship a much broader, more satisfying and more worthwhile experience.

Who provides this? As my noble friend Lady Wall explained, large companies do a lot of this work for themselves and their suppliers. Some industries have group training associations and there are some excellent private sector training contractors. But there is one group of unsung heroes in this modernisation of apprenticeships which is often ignored—the colleges of further education. I live in Richmond and, when preparing for this debate, I visited Richmond upon Thames College, our local college of further education, and spoke to Rob Rudd who, my noble friend Lord Sugar will be pleased to know, mentors some 130 apprentices. They spend up to l6 hours a week at work and the rest at college. The state pays because they are under 18; but over-18 year-olds who have not done well at school, have become disengaged at school, or who are not academic and prefer practical work, or older people who require reskilling, can find their second chance at a place such as Richmond upon Thames College.

The college finds local companies with vacancies, in addition to the National Apprenticeship Service. There are no big firms in Richmond, and so the college caters for hundreds of small and medium-sized enterprises in the area. This is especially difficult because many of these small companies are either reluctant to offer apprenticeships or had not really thought about it. The college therefore employs somebody to go around all of these firms to create apprenticeship places—a kind of employment agency.

Furthermore, the college subsidises some of these apprenticeships. With an apprentice of 19 or older, the employer is meant to contribute 50 per cent. Some firms do not pay, either because they cannot afford it or because they are just unwilling to do so. The college carries the extra cost. Private training companies work mainly with the service sector, for which many young people are just not suited. The colleges tend to do the more costly things, like technology, construction, engineering, IT and catering.

Perhaps noble Lords can see why FE colleges are the unsung heroes of apprenticeships. I know that the Minister is aware of their work, and so I hope that she will agree with me. Her honourable friend the Minister of State for Further Education, Mr John Hayes, in his speech of 29 September said,

“We are also taking an overdue look at ... the costs of Apprenticeships”.

In the same speech, Mr Hayes also said that the Government have begun to provide an extra 50,000 apprenticeships by redeploying £150 million. Can the Minister say where the extra 50,000 places will be provided and from where the £150 million is being redeployed? How will it affect FE colleges?

One way in which the Government can help these colleges is to take into account prior learning delivered by the college. Many colleges have young apprentice schemes or pre-apprentice schemes which provide a year at college to help apprentices attain the standards they need in maths, English and IT—the soft skills. The proposal is that they will then be tested again when they qualify. It would be sensible to maintain the exemption that already exists. I see from its website that the Minister's department has extended the consultation on this. I hope that the Minister will agree that there is no need to add more regulation to the already rather complex situation.

We all seem to agree that knowledge and skills are the key to future prosperity and a more equal society. The noble Baroness, Lady Sharp, and my noble friend Lord Bhattacharyya spoke about how, when Labour was in power, it persistently pushed up apprentice participation rates. Can the Minister assure us that this Government will continue the good work?