Economy: Manufacturing

Lord Jenkin of Roding Excerpts

Thursday 3rd July 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Jenkin of Roding (Con)]

My Lords, I very much welcome the chance that my noble friend Lady Wilcox has given us to discuss this hugely important subject. Later, I shall refer to one or two of the things that she said in her excellent speech.

Like the noble Lord, Lord Monks, I read the speech made by my noble friend Lord Bamford with huge interest and admiration. It was very eloquent, particularly about the role of professional engineers—engineers who have done a full professional course and qualified—which is what I am going to talk about exclusively this afternoon. During the debate on the Queen’s Speech my noble friend said that,

“behind every product there is an army of talented creators, makers and engineers … We need their brains, hands, knowledge, creativity, design and technical skills and, most importantly, we need them to know that they are valued by society as a whole”.—[Official Report, 10/6/14; col. 268.]

I thought that was an inspiring description of what engineers do. Yet here we are in a country which it is widely recognised needs to be training twice as many professional engineers as it is training at the moment.

This led me to study a remarkable article by an extremely knowledgeable academic, Professor Kel Fidler, who gave a paper to the Royal Academy of Engineering on engineering and big science. He called his article Sorting Out Engineering: The Need for a Major Review. That is what I want to recommend to the Minister this morning. I can only summarise the professor’s arguments as the article covers pages, but I want to talk about the main subject. Of course, the training of technicians, which my noble friend Lord Young of Graffham referred to, is enormously important, but the shortage of university-trained engineers is one of the things that are holding this country back.

The professor’s first point is—and here I differ a little from what has been said— that despite all the considerable efforts to attract the interest of young people, and they have been considerable, the proportion of applicants to go to universities to study engineering courses has been virtually unchanged over the past 10 years at around 3.5%. There has been a modest increase, but it simply parallels the increase in the number of applicants. The professor said that,

“all the initiatives to get proportionately more young people onto engineering … courses … have so far been unsuccessful”.

Of course there is much enthusiasm—things such as the Big Bang attract enormous numbers of people—but it does not turn them on to choosing engineering as a career. That is what we really have got to tackle and so one asks why. There is no shortage of facilities in universities. That is clear. There is excellent teaching and equipment. As my noble friend Lady Wilcox noted, the real problem is that, in the words of the professor,

“many young people and their teachers remain largely ignorant about the nature of engineering”.

This ignorance is also true of parents, teachers and the nation as a whole.

The National Grid summed up some of these things recently in its report Engineering Our Future: Inspiring and Attracting Tomorrow’s Engineers:

“Engineering is seen a job rather than a profession. The work has an image of being menial, dirty and about fixing things … This leads to low appreciation of what engineers do for society. Both parents and young people placed engineering below medicine, teaching and policing in its contribution to modern life”.

If this is true it is immensely disturbing.

I will make another point. It is more controversial. There is confusion between engineering and science. I know that there are many departments of engineering in universities called “engineering and science”. However, they are not the same. Again, Professor Fidler makes the point that,

“science is about understanding the world … engineering is about creating things … embracing design, creativity and innovation”.

So what do we do about it? The Americans again have pointed the way and other speakers have made this point. The National Academy of Engineering in 2008 recommended a rebranding of engineering as a strategy. It wanted the message to get across that:

“Engineers make a world of difference. Engineers are creative problem solvers. Engineers help shape the future. Engineering is essential to our health, happiness and safety”.

Back in 1981 when my noble friend Lord Young of Graffham worked with me for a short time when I was Industry Secretary, I inherited the Finniston report, which recommended a major reshaping of the professional institutions of engineering. It failed abysmally. There was a total refusal on the part of those institutions even to contemplate change. A third of a century later we are still paying the price. This must not happen again.

This is where I come to the professor’s main recommendation, which I commend to my noble friend. He says that all the major stakeholders such as the Government, the nation, the professional engineering institutions, the Engineering Council, the Engineering Employers’ Federation, the Royal Academy of Engineering and industry—and, I add, certainly the trade unions—must get together. They must decide not just what needs to be done—there have been endless reports—but how it is going to be done. In my view, this requires the leadership of Ministers and I look forward to the Minister’s reply.