Manufacturing: Digital Technology

Lord Haskel Excerpts

Thursday 2nd November 2017 Lords Chamber

Asked by

[Lord Haskel]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what is their response to the Made Smarter Review on the benefits of applying digital technology to the manufacturing industry, published on 30 October.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (Lord Henley) (Con)]

My Lords, Her Majesty’s Government welcome the Made Smarter report and thank Juergen Maier and the industry team for their work in outlining the huge potential that digitalisation offers to United Kingdom manufacturing. We look forward to working closely with industry to ensure that the United Kingdom can capitalise on the massive benefits of digital technology, which this report makes so clear, and realise its potential to be a global leader in the industrial digital technology revolution.

[Lord Haskel (Lab)]

My Lords, I am pleased that the Government welcome the report, as I do. As the report says, digitalisation can deliver a much-needed boost to our productivity. However, the report also points out that it is a disruptive technology for jobs and businesses. In implementing the report, what arrangements will the Government make for those who are displaced? Will there be a safety net? What procedures will the Government implement to ensure that people are not damaged by this?

[Lord Henley]

As the noble Lord will be aware, the report is quite big—246 pages. It was published on Monday. I arrived in the department on Monday, so I cannot claim to have read it from cover to cover at this point. No doubt he will criticise me for that, but I will start on it over the weekend. We recognise that this technology presents great challenges, including for raising productivity. The noble Lord is right to talk about the challenges of the fact that, in creating new, higher-paid and higher-skilled jobs, it creates a threat to other jobs—something we went through in the first Industrial Revolution when the spinning jenny and other things came in. It also creates opportunities for new jobs, which is what we want. I think he will accept that at this stage, with a 246-page report having been published only on Monday, it is a bit early for the Government to make any pronouncements on it.