Skills and Post-16 Education Bill [HL]

Lord Liddle Excerpts

2nd reading
Tuesday 15th June 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Liddle (Lab)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure as always to follow one of the interesting speeches of the noble Lord, Lord Cormack. However, on this occasion it is an even greater pleasure to congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Black of Strome, on her maiden speech. I have a bit of history with her: her current position is pro-vice-chancellor for engagement at Lancaster University, and when I was chair of the council I—along with others on the panel—appointed her. It was the easiest appointment I have ever made in my life, and that does not reflect on the quality of the other applicants. Sue is tremendous and she will make a great contribution to this House.

We are talking today about a very serious subject: that of decades of public policy failure on Britain’s part in education. We have made multiple efforts: the technical schools of the 1944 Act that never happened; the training boards that Labour established in the 1960s but were then thought unsatisfactory; and the learning and skills councils established by my noble friend Lord Blunkett but then abolished. There has been no stability of approach and no stable institutions, and we have huge problems.

I first came across this issue when I worked with my noble friend Lord Mandelson at the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills at the fag end of the Labour Government. We suddenly realised, based on the work of my noble friend Lord Sainsbury and his Gatsby Foundation, that we were facing a real crisis in technicians: if we were not able to have sufficiently highly qualified technicians, how could we be a successful economy working at the frontier of knowledge? We have heard today from the noble Lord, Lord Baker, about the lack of training in digital skills and computing. Another worry is construction. This Government, rightly, have huge ambitions for public investment—we are raising it from something like 2% to 4% of GDP—but if we do not have the workers how are they going to fulfil those ambitions?

I welcome the Bill. I would not say that the present Secretary of State for Education was one of the Conservatives whom I most admire—I admire many Conservatives, by the way—but I praise him for taking up the cause of further education. I hope his efforts will have more success than the past decades of failure.

One of the most shocking things that I have learned in this debate is from my noble friend Lord Layard, who had enormous influence over the policies of the Blair and Brown Governments, when he said that today we are in a situation where one-third of 18 year- olds are not in any form of education or training. That is a recipe for a low-pay, low-skill economy with massive inequalities for decades to come. It is a recipe for social disaster in the world of knowledge, advanced technology, artificial intelligence and all that which we are moving into. We have to do something about it.

The funding of lifelong learning, the introduction of modular courses and efforts to secure greater employer involvement are all admirable. However, there are a couple of matters about which I worry. First, I worry that the whole approach is too centralised. I have always been very sceptical of the Skills Funding Agency, which holds the whole system in an iron grip and does not allow for local flexibility and initiative. I would like mayors and combined authorities working with employers to develop skills improvement plans on a localised basis in England. Secondly, the education system needs collaboration, not polarisation. I saw this at Lancaster, a very good university, where we had a very good partnership with Barrow’s college of further education to train graduate engineers for the Vickers yard.

Such collaboration between colleges and universities should be strengthened; we should not be trying to force the systems apart. That is very important. I worry that we are allowing ourselves to think that university expansion has reached its limit. We in this country are supposed to admire places like Asia. Well, in places such as South Korea something like 70% of children are going to university, so do not let us have any artificial limits.

I shall make a final point. We must be prepared to put public money into this. We can make choices about it, but I think personally that my own party’s commitment to abolish tuition fees is ridiculous, given the amount of money that we have to spend on other aspects of education. On the government side, the Conservatives have to recognise that further education and apprenticeships have been an area of massive underfunding. We need a joint commitment to create stable institutions and to provide the funding that will lead to a transformation in this field.