King’s Speech

Lord Knight of Weymouth Excerpts

Tuesday 14th November 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Knight of Weymouth (Lab)]

My Lords, it is always a pleasure to follow the noble Baroness. I particularly endorse her last comments around digital exclusion. I very much look forward to the three maiden speeches from the welcome new Members of your Lordships’ House.

Our cultural sector, our sports industries and our flair for design are a large part of what defines this country globally. They are also critical in defining our future success and that of our children. By the time a child currently in reception leaves school in 2037, we will need to have shifted to a new economic model and a new social contract, and embedded a new way of working that is no longer exploiting people or the planet. We need a truly sustainable and equitable future if we are to give that child the opportunity to thrive.

At the same time, as AI moves apace, it will, as we heard from the AI summit, largely disrupt the labour market; workers will be deskilled as machines combine highly agile robotics with the ability to recognise patterns, predict language and assimilate vast amounts of information, while learning to constantly improve their accuracy. New and exciting jobs will emerge, with inventiveness, curiosity and unpredictability at their heart, to work alongside these machines of prediction. These are big challenges.

The gracious Speech is the chance to hear the Government’s vision to address these huge challenges. By contrast, it reminded me of a decaf cappuccino. On the surface, there were some good sprinklings of legislative cocoa powder: I am a fan of the proposals on football governance and will want to do my bit on the digital markets and data protection Bills; I will be especially keen to explore how forms of data trust can help build public confidence in data sharing so that we can exploit the potential of AI for good to the full. The Speech also had plenty of froth: we will have to see whether warm words on support for the creative industries, making AI safe, or fixing apprenticeship take-up will amount to anything at all. But at its heart, the Speech lacked substance and offered not a glimmer of hope for future generations that things can get better. It is as though the Government have run out of ideas and are incapable of thinking long-term beyond the next general election.

Yesterday saw a commitment to recycling ministerial resources but lacked the punch we need to get Britain building again, to drive us forward into a sustainable green economy. The Speech lacked the shot of stimulant that the country needs to get us moving again and to fix the NHS and our wider public services that remain underinvested and broken following David Cameron’s years of austerity. Most importantly, it lacked a future vision to offer the opportunities our young people need to face the uncertainties of the future with confidence.

I should draw noble Lords’ attention to my entry in the register, in particular as a director of CENTURY Tech and EDUCATE Ventures, both businesses deploying AI in education. I know from that commercial work that hiring talent in the tech sector is really challenging. What does this Speech have to offer that challenge? I know from work I recently completed for Engineering UK with the noble Lord, Lord Willetts, who I am delighted to see in his place, that without reversing the decline in engineering apprenticeships we will fail to have the technical skills we need to transition to a growing green economy. What does this Speech have to offer that challenge?

For the technology and cultural sectors, access to skills is key and a constraint on current growth. What did the Speech have to say on reversing the catastrophic decline in the creative subjects and in design and technology in our schools? How can we build a pipeline of talent into design, engineering and technology if the only applied subject in the national curriculum is fading away? The number of students entering design and technology GCSE has more than halved since 2009. In that time, the numbers teaching the subject have also halved; teacher recruitment for D&T met just 23% of its overall target in 2021-22, and it is getting worse. I wish the new Schools Minister well and hope that he recognises that school accountability in the English baccalaureate and Progress 8 have all contributed to this decline.

This Minister at the Dispatch Box will know that one of our most inspirational Britons is Sir Jony Ive, the designer of a suite of Apple products, including my iPad here, that have changed the world. His dad was a D&T teacher and inspector and Jony left school to study industrial design in Newcastle. For this Minister the question is simply: does he agree that the decline in every creative subject except art in schools at GCSE and the decline in design and technology is now at a critical point for the long-term future of the sectors we are focused on in this debate? Will he be meeting the new Minister, Damian Hinds, and pushing him to accelerate and extend the ambition of the advanced British standard? The Speech promised that it will bring technical and academic routes into a single qualification, but we know that that will take 10 years and not extend below 16. That is too little and way too late for this country’s technology, creative and sustainable futures.

We are all proud of our cultural and digital sectors in this country. As we can see, the rapid adoption of AI means that the competitive advantage of humans over machines can be so only if we are better humans: more creative, more expressive, more caring, more inventive; that is our future. We need a Government who understand the urgency of making the changes we need to deliver that hopeful opportunity.